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WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Alarms and Discursions 

All Things Considered 

The Ballad of the White Horse 

Charles Dickens 

The Flying Inn 

George Bernard Shaw 

Heretics 

The Innocence of Father Brown 

Manalive 

The Man Who Was Thursday 

The Napoleon of Netting Hill: A Romance 

Orthodoxy 

Poems 

A Short History of England 

The Superstition of Divorce 

Tremendous Trifles 

The Uses of Diversity 

Varied Types 

What's Wrong with the World 

The Wisdom of Father Brown 



WHAT I SAW 
IN AMERICA 



BY 

G. K. CHESTERTON 

Author of "Heretics,** etc. 




NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1922 



COPTBIGHT, 1922, 

By DODD, mead AND COMPANY, lira 

PBINTID IN V, 8. A. 



VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY 

BINflHAMTON AND NEW VONK 



SEP 26 "22 

©CI.A683383 



CONTENTS 

PAGB 

What is America? . . . .: . ■.,.. . .: . . i 
A Meditation in a New York Hotel ..... 19 

A Meditation in Broadway 33 

Irish and Other Interviewers 47 

Some American Cities 63 

In the American Country . c. ...... 79 

The Amemcan Business Man 95 

Presidents and Problems . , . . . . . .118 

Prohibition in Fact and Fancy 141 

Fads and Public Opinion ........ 158 

The Extraordinary American 176 

The Republican in the Ruins ....... 188 

Is THE Atlantic Narrowing? ...,.,... 201 
Lincoln and Lost Causes ....... i* . . 214 

Wells and the World State ....... 226 

A New Martin Chuzzlewit •....,.• 243 

The Spirit of America ....*►*... 257 

The Spirit of England ..... .. i. .. . 270 

The Future of Democracy . .....* .^ .. . 284 



WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 



WHAT IS AMERICA? 

1HAVE never managed to lose my old conviction that 
travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make 
a double effort of moral humility and imaginative 
energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed 
there is something touching and even tragic about the 
thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed 
at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and 
clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Sur- 
biton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and 
see what they looked like. This is not meant for non- 
sense ; still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense, 
which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at 
home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather an 
inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any 
man may be inside any men. But to travel is to leave the 
inside and draw dangerously near the outside. So long 
as he thought of men in the abstract, like naked toiling 
figures in some classic frieze, merely as those who labour 
and love their children and die, he was thinking the fun- 
damental truth about them. By going to look at their un- 
familiar manners and customs he is inviting them to dis- 
guise themselves in fantastic masks and costumes. Many 
modern internationalists talk as if men of different na- 
tionalities had only to meet and mix and understand each 
other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger 

1 



2 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

— the moment when they meet. We might shiver, as at 
the old euphemism by which a meeting meant a duel. 

Travel ought to combine amusement with instruction; 
but most travellers are so much amused that they refuse 
to be instructed. I do not blame them for being amused ; 
it is perfecty natural to be amused at a Dutchman for 
being Dutch or a Chinaman for being Chinese. Where 
they are wrong is that they take their own amusement 
seriously. They base on it their serious ideas of inter- 
national instruction. It was said that the Englishman 
takes his pleasures sadly; and the pleasure of despising 
foreigners is one which he takes most sadly of all. He 
comes to scoff and does not remain to pray, but rather to 
excommunicate. Hence in international relations there 
is far too little laughing, and far too much sneering. But 
I believe that there is a better way which largely consists 
of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which 
is actually founded on differences. To hint at some such 
better way is the only excuse of this book. 

Let me begin my American impressions with two im- 
pressions I had before I went to America. One was an 
incident and the other an idea ; and when taken together 
they illustrate the attitude I mean. The first principle is 
that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny 
because it is foreign; the second is that he should be 
ashamed of thinking it wrong because it is funny. The 
reaction of his senses and superficial habits of mind 
against something new, and to him abnormal, is a per- 
fectly healthy reaction. But the mind which imagines 
that mere unfamiliarity can possibly prove anything about 
inferiority is a very inadequate mind. It is inadequate 
even in criticising things that may really be inferior to the 
things involved here. It is far better to laugh at a negro 



WHAT IS AMERICA? 3 

for having a black face than to sneer at him for having 
a sloping skull. It is proportionally even more prefer- 
able to laugh rather than judge in dealing with highly 
civilised peoples. Therefore I put at the beginning two 
working examples of what I felt about America before I 
saw it; the sort of thing that a man has a right to enjoy 
as a joke, and the sort of thing he has a duty to under- 
stand and respect, because it is the explanation of the 
joke. 

When I went to the American consulate to regularise 
my passports, I was capable of expecting the American 
consulate to be American. Embassies and consulates are 
by tradition like islands of the soil for which they stand ; 
and I have often found the tradition corresponding to a 
truth. I have seen the unmistakable French official living 
on omelettes and a little wine and serving his sacred ab- 
stractions under the last palm-trees fringing a desert. In 
the heat and noise of quarrelling Turks and Egyptians, I 
have come suddenly, as with the cool shock of his own 
shower-bath, on the listless amiability of the English 
gentleman. The officials I interviewed were very Ameri- 
can, especially in being very polite; for whatever may 
have been the mood or meaning of Martin Chuzzlewit, I 
have always found Americans by far the politest people in 
the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up, 
to all appearances like other forms I had filled up in other 
passport offices. But in reality it was very different from 
any form I had ever filled up in my life. At least it was a 
little like a freer form of the game called 'Confessions' 
which my friends and I invented in our youth ; an exami- 
nation paper containing questions Hke, Tf you saw a rhi- 
noceros in the front garden, what would you do ?' One 
of my friends, I remember, wrote, Take the pledge.' 



4 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

But that is another story, and might bring Mr. Pussyfoot 
Johnson on the scene before his time. 

One of the questions on the paper was, 'Are you an 
anarchist?' To which a detached philosopher would 
naturally feel inclined to answer, 'What the devil has that 
to do with you? Are you an atheist?' along with some 
playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what 
constitutes an apxr). Then there was the question, 
*Are you in favour of subverting the government of the 
United States by force?' Against this I should write, 
T prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour 
and not the beginning.' The inquisitor, in his more than 
morbid curiosity, had then written down, 'Are you a po- 
lygamist?' The answer to this is, 'No such luck' or 'Not 
such a fool,' according to our experience of the other sex. 
But perhaps a better answer would be that given to W. T. 
Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question, 'Shall 
I slay my brother Boer?' — the answer that ran, 'Never 
interfere in family matters.' But among many things 
that amused me almost to the point of treating the form 
thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was the thought of 
the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it 
respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, 
seeking to slip into America with official papers under 
official protection, and sitting down to write with a beauti- 
ful gravity, 'I am an anarchist. I hate you all and wish 
to destroy you.' Or, T intend to subvert by force the 
government of the United States as soon as possible, 
sticking the long sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket 
into Mr. Harding at the earliest opportunity.' Or again, 
'Yes, I am a polygamist all right, and my forty-seven 
wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as 
secretaries.' There seems to be a certain simplicity of 



WHAT IS AMERICA? -5 

mind about these answers ; and it is reassuring to know 
that anarchists and polygamists are so pure and good 
that the police have only to ask them questions and they 
are certain to tell no lies. 

Now that is the model of the sort of foreign practice, 
founded on foreign problems, at which a man's first im- 
pulse is naturally to laugh. Nor have I any intention of 
apologising for my laughter. A man is perfectly en- 
titled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it 
incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh 
at it as incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he 
comprehended it. The very fact of its unfamiliarity and 
mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes 
that make people so different from himself, and that with- 
out merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself. 

Superficially this is rather a queer business. It would 
be easy enough to suggest that in this America has intro- 
duced a quite abnormal spirit of inquisition; an interfer- 
ence with liberty unknown among all the ancient despot- 
isms and aristocracies. About that there will be some- 
thing to be said later ; but superficially it is true that this 
degree of officialism is comparatively unique. In a jour- 
ney which I took only the year before I had occasion to 
have my papers passed by governments which many 
worthy people in the West would vaguely identify with 
corsairs and assassins; I have stood on the other side of 
Jordan, in the land ruled by a rude Arab chief, where the 
police looked so like brigands that one wondered what the 
brigands looked like. But they did not ask me whether I 
had come to subvert the power of the Shereef ; and they 
did not exhibit the faintest curiosity about my personal 
views on the ethical basis of civil authority. These minis- 
ters of ancient Moslem despotism did not care about 



6 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

whether I was an anarchist ; and naturally would not have 
minded if I had been a polygamist. The Arab chief was 
probably a polygamist himself. These slaves of Asiatic 
autocracy were content, in the old liberal fashion, to 
judge me by my actions; they did not inquire into my 
thoughts. They held* their power as limited to the limita- 
tion of practice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory. 
It would be easy to argue here th'at Western democracy 
persecutes where even Eastern despotism tolerates or 
emancipates. It would be easy to develop the fancy that, 
as compared with the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, the 
American Constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inqui- 
sition. 

Only the traveller who stops at that point is totally 
wrong ; and the traveller only too often does stop at that 
point. He has found something to make him laugh, and 
he will not suiff er it to make him think. And the remedy 
is not to unsay what he has said, not even, so to speak, to 
'unlaugh what he has laughed, not to deny that there is 
something unique and curious about this American inqui- 
sition into our abstract opinions, but rather to continue the 
train of thought, and follow the admirable advice of 
Mr. H. G. Wells, who said, *It is not much good thinking 
of a thing unless you think it out.* It is not to deny that 
American officialism is rather peculiar on this point, but to 
inquire what it really is which makes America peculiar, 
or which is peculiar to America. In short, it is to get 
some ultimate idea of what America is; and the answer 
to that question will reveal something much deeper and 
grander and more worthy of our intelligent interest. 

It may have seemed something less than a compliment 
to compare the American Constitution to the Spanish 
Inquisition. But oddly enough, it does involve a truth, 



WHAT IS AMERICA? 7 

and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve a compli- 
ment. The American Constitution does resemble the 
Spanish Inquisition in this : that it is founded on a creed. 
America is the only nation in the world that is founded 
on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and 
even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independ- 
ence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is 
also theoretical politics and also great literature. It 
enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, 
that governments exist to give them that justice, and that 
their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does 
condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference con- 
demn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the 
ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are de- 
rived. Nobody expects a modern political system to pro- 
ceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in 
the matter of God and Government it is naturally God 
whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there 
is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human 
things. 

Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest 
thing in the world. In its nature it is as broad as its 
scheme for a brotherhood of all men. In its nature it is 
limited by its definition of the nature of all men. This 
was true of the Christian Church, which was truly said 
to exclude neither Jew nor Greek, but which did definitely 
substitute something else for Jewish religion or Greek 
philosophy. It was truly said to be a net drawing in of 
all kinds; but a net of a certain pattern, the pattern of 
Peter the Fisherman. And this is true even of the most 
disastrous distortions or degradations of that creed; and 
true among others of the Spanish Inquisition. It may 
have been narrow about theology, it could not confess to 



8 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

being narrow about nationality or ethnology. The Span- 
ish Inquisition might be admittedly Inquisitorial ; but the 
Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish. Such 
a Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own 
creed, had to be broader than his own empire. He might 
burn a philosopher because he was heterodox ; but he must 
accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. And we 
see, even in modern times, that the same Church which 
is blamed for making sages heretics is also blamed for 
making savages priests. Now in a much vaguer and 
more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the 
same idea at the back of the great American experiment; 
the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which 
has been compared to a melting-pot. But even that meta- 
phor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and 
a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melt- 
ing-pot must not melt. The original shape was traced 
on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain 
in that shape until it becomes shapeless. America invites 
all men to become citizens ; but it implies the dogma that 
there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, so far as its 
primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious 
because it is not racial. The missionary can condemn a 
cannibal, precisely because he cannot condemn a Sandwich 
Islander. And in something of the same spirit the Amer- 
ican may exclude a polygamist, precisely because he can- 
not exclude a Turk. 

Now for America this is no idle theory. It may have 
been theoretical, though it was thoroughly sincere, when 
that great Virginian gentleman declared it in surround- 
ings that still had something of the character of an Eng- 
lish countryside. It is not merely theoretical now. 
There is nothing to prevent America being literally in- 



WHAT IS AMERICA? 9 

vaded by Turks, as she is invaded by Jews or Bulgars. 
In the most exquisitely inconsequent of the Bab Ballads, 
we are told concerning Pasha Bailey Ben : — 

One morning knocked at half -past eight 
A tall Red Indian at his gate. 
In Turkey, as you'r' p'raps aware. 
Red Indians are extremely rare. 

But the converse need by no means be true. There is 
nothing in the nature of things to prevent an emigration 
of Turks increasing and multiplying on the plains where 
the Red Indians wandered ; there is nothing to necessitate 
the Turks being extremely rare. The Red Indians, alas, 
are likely to be rarer. And as I much prefer Red Indians 
to Turks, not to mention Jews, I speak without prejudice; 
but the point here is that America, partly by original 
theory and partly by historical accident, does lie open to 
racial admixtures which most countries would think incon- 
gruous or comic. That is why it is only fair to read any 
American definitions or rules in a certain light, and 
relatively to a rather unique position. It is not fair to 
compare the position of those who may meet Turks in 
the back street with that of those who have never met 
Turks except in the Bab Ballads. It is not fair simply to 
compare America with England in its regulations about 
the Turk. In short, it is not fair to do what almost every 
Englishman probably does ; to look at the American inter- 
national examination paper, and laugh and be satisfied 
with saying, *We don't have any of that nonsense in Eng- 
land.' 

We do not havi3 any of that nonsense in England be- 
cause we have never attempted to have any of that phil- 
osophy in England. And, above all, because we have the 



lo WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

enormous advantage of feeling it natural to be national, 
because there is nothing else to be. England in these days 
is not well governed ; England is not well educated ; Eng- 
land suffers from wealth and poverty that are not well 
distributed. But England is English; esto perpetua. 
England is English as France is French or Ireland is 
Irish ; the great mass of men taking certain national tra- 
ditions for granted. Now this gives us a totally different 
and a very much easier task. We have not got an inqui- 
sition, because we have not got a creed ; but it is arguable 
that we do not need a creed, because we have got a char- 
acter. In any of the old nations the national unity is 
preserved by the national type. Because we have a type 
we do not need to have a test. 

Take that innocent question, *Are you an anarchist? 
which is intrinsically quite as impudent as *Are you an 
optimist?' or *Are you a philanthropist?' I am not dis- 
cussing here whether these things are right, but whether 
most of us are in a position to know them rightly. Now 
it is quite true that most Englishmen do not find it nec- 
essary to go about all day asking each other whether they 
are anarchists. It is quite true that the phrase occurs on 
no British forms that I have seen. But this is not only 
because most of the Englishmen are not anarchists. It 
is even more because even the anarchists are Englishmen. 
For instance, it would be easy to make fun of the Amer- 
ican formula by noting that the cap would fit all sorts 
of bald academic heads. It might well be maintained 
that Herbert Spencer was an anarchist. It is practi- 
cally certain that Auberon Herbert was an anarchist. 
But Herbert Spencer was an extraordinary typical 
Englishman of the Nonconformist middle class. And 
Auberon Herbert was an extraordinarily typical English 



WHAT IS AMERICA? ii 

aristocrat of the old and genuine aristocracy. Every 
one knew in his head that the squire would not throw a 
bomb at the Queen, and the Nonconformist would not 
throw a bomb at anybody. Evc-ry one knew that there 
was something subconscious in a man like Auberon 
Herbert, which would have come out only in throwing 
bombs at the enemies of England; as it did come out in 
his son and namesake, the generous and unforgotten, who 
fell flinging bombs from the sky far beyond the German 
line. Every one knows that normally, in the last resort, 
the English gentleman is patriotic. Every one knows 
that the English Nonconformist is national even when 
he denies that he is patriotic. Nothing is more notable 
indeed than the fact that nobody is more stamped with 
the mark of his own nation than the man who says that 
there ought to be no nations. Somebody called Cobden 
the International Man ; but no man could be more English 
than Cobden. Everybody recognises Tolstoy as the 
iconoclast of all patriotism; but nobody could be more 
Russian than Tolstoy. In the old countries where there 
are these national types, the types may be allowed to 
hold any theories. Even if they hold certain theories 
they are unlikely to do certain things. So the conscien- 
tious objector, in the English sense, may be and is one 
of the peculiar by-products of England. But the con- 
scientious objector will probably have a conscientious 
objection to throwing bombs. 

Now I am very far from intending to imply that 
these American tests are good tests or that there is no 
danger of tyranny becoming the temptation of America. 
I shall have something to say later on about that temp- 
tation or tendency. Nor do I say that they apply con- 
sistently this conception of a nation with the soul of a 



12 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

church, protected by religious and not racial selection. 
If they did apply that principle consistently, they would 
have to exclude pessimists and rich cynics who deny the 
democratic ideal ; an excellent thing but a rather improb- 
able one. What I say is that when we realize that this 
principle exists at all, we see the whole position in a 
totally different perspective. We say that the Ameri- 
cans ans doing something heroic or doing something in- 
sane, or doing it in an unworkable or unworthy fash- 
ion, instead of simply wondering what the devil they are 
doing. 

When we realise the democratic design of such a cos- 
mopolitan commonwealth, and compare it with our insu- 
lar reliance or instincts, we see at once why such a thing 
has to be not only democratic but dogmatic. We see 
why in some points it tends to be inquisitive or intoler- 
ant. Any one can see the practical point by merely 
transferring into private life a problem like that of the 
two academic anarchists, who might by a coincidence 
be called the two Herberts. Suppose a man said, 
*Buffle, my old Oxford tutor, wants to meet you; I wish 
you'd ask him down for a day or two. He has the 
oddest opinions, but he's very stimulating.' It would 
not occur to us that the oddity of the Oxford don's 
opinions would lead him to blow up the house; because 
the Oxford don is an English type. Suppose some- 
body said, *Do let me bring old Colonel Robinson down 
for the week-end; he's a bit of crank but quite inter- 
esting.' We should not anticipate the colonel running 
amuck with a carving-knife and offering up human 
sacrifice in the garden; for these are not among the 
daily habits of an old English colonel; and because we 
know his habits, we do not care about his opinions. 



WHAT IS AMERICA? 13 

But suppose somebody offered to bring a person from 
the interior of Kamskatka to stay with us for a week 
or two, and added that his rehgion was a very extraor- 
dinary religion, we should feel a little more inquisitive 
about what kind of religion it was. If somebody wished 
to add a Hairy Ainu to the family party at Christmas, 
explaining that his point of view was so individual and 
interesting, we should want to know a little more about 
it and him. We should be tempted to draw up as fan- 
tastic an examination paper as that presented to the emi- 
grant going to America. We should ask what a Hairy 
Ainu was, and how hairy he was, and above all what 
sort of Ainu he was. Would etiquette require us to 
ask him to bring his wife? And if we did ask him to 
bring his wife, how many wives would he bring? In 
short, as in the American formula, is he a polygamist? 
Merely as a point of houskeeping and accommodation 
the question is not irrelevant. Is the Hairy Ainu content 
with hair, or does he wear any clothes? If the police 
insist on his wearing clothes, will he recognise the author- 
ity of the police? In short, as in the American formula, 
is he an anarchist? 

Of course this generalisation about America, like 
other historical things, is subject to all sorts of cross 
divisions and exceptions, to be considered in their place. 
The negroes are a special problem, because of what 
white men in the past did to them. The Japanese are 
a special problem, because of what men fear that they 
in the future may do to white men. The Jews are a 
special problem, because of what they and the Gentiles, 
in the past, present and future, seem to have the habit of 
doing to each other. But the point is ndt that nothing 
exists in America except this idea; it is that nothing 



14 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

like this idea exists anywhere except in America. This 
idea is not internationaUsm ; on the contrary it is decid- 
edly nationalism. The Americans are very patriotic, and 
wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans. 
But it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of 
any old nation that comes along. In a word, what is 
unique is not America but what is called Americanisation. 
We understand nothing till we understand the amazing 
ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy- 
Ainu. We are not trying to Anglicise thousands of 
French cooks or Italian organ grinders. France is 
not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or 
German prisoners of war. America is the one place in 
the world where this process, healthy or unhealthy, pos- 
sible or impossible, is going on. And the process, as I 
have pointed out, is not internationalisation. It would be 
truer to say it is the nationalisation of the international- 
ised. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a 
nation out of exiles. This is what at once illuminates 
and softens the moral regulations which we may really 
think faddist or fanatical. They are abnormal; but in 
one sense this experiment of a home for the homeless 
is abnormal. In short, it has long been recognised that 
America was an asylum. It is only since Prohibition 
that it has looked a little Hke a lunatic asylum. 

It was before sailing for America, as I have said, that 
I stood with the offtcial paper in my hand and these 
thoughts in my head. It was while I stood on English 
soil that I passed through the two stages of smiling and 
then sympathising; of realising that my momentary 
amusement, at being asked if I were not an Anarchist, 
was partly due to the fact that I was not an American. 
And in truth I think there are some things a man ought 



WHAT IS AMERICA? 15 

to know about America before he sees it. What we know 
of a country beforehand may not affect what we see 
that it is; but it will vitally affect what we appreciate it 
for being, because it will vitally affect what we expected it 
to be. I can honestly say that I had never expected 
America to be what nine-tenths of the newspaper 
critics invariably assume it to be. I never thought 
it was a sort of Anglo-Saxon colony, knowing that 
it was more and more thronged with crowds of very 
different colonists. During the war I felt that the 
very worst propaganda for the Allies was the propa- 
ganda for the Anglo-Saxons. I tried to point out that in 
one way America is nearer to Europe than England is. 
if she is not nearer to Bohemia, she is nearer to Bohe- 
mians. In my New York hotel the head waiter in the di- 
ning-room was a Bohemian ; the head waiter in the grill- 
room was a Bulgar. Americans have nationalities at the 
end of the street which for us are at the ends of the earth. 
I did my best to persuade my countrymen not to appeal to 
the American as if he were a rather dowdy Englishman, 
who had been rusticating in the provinces and had not 
heard the latest news about the town. I shall record later 
some of those arresting realities which the traveller does 
not expect ; and which, in some cases I fear, he actually 
does not see because he does not expect. I shall try to 
do justice to the psychology of what Mr. Belloc has called 
*Eye-Openers in Travel.' But there are some things 
about America that a man ought to see even with his 
eyes shut. One is that a state that came into existence 
solely through its repudiation and abhorrence of the 
British Crown is not likely to be a respectful copy of 
the British Constitution. Another is that the chief 
mark of the Declaration of Independence is something 



i6 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

that Is not only absent from the British Constitution, 
but something which all our constitutionalists have in- 
variably thanked God, with the j oiliest boasting and 
bragging, that they had kept out of the British Consti- 
tution. It is the thing called abstraction or academic 
logic. It is the thing which such jolly people call theory; 
and which those who can practice it call thought. And 
the theory or thought is the very last to which English 
people are accustomed, either by their social structure 
or their traditional teaching. It is the theory of equality. 
It is the pure classic conception that no man must aspire 
to be anything more than a citizen, and that no man 
should endure to be anything less. It is by no means 
especially intelligible to an Englishman, who tends at 
his best to the virtues of the gentleman and at his worst 
to the vices of the snob. The idealism of England, or if 
you will the romance of England, has not been primarily 
the romance of the citizen. But the idealism of 
A'merica, we may safely say, still revolves entirely round 
the citizen and his romance. The realities are quite an- 
other matter, and we shall consideu in its place the ques- 
tion of whether the ideal will be able to shape the realities 
or will merely be beaten shapeless by them. The ideal 
is besieged by inequalities of the most towering and insane 
description in the industrial and economic field. It may 
be devoured by modern capitalism, perhaps the worst 
inequality that ever existed among men. Of all that we 
shall speak later. But citizenship is still the American 
ideal; there is an army of actualities opposed to that 
ideal ; but there is no ideal opposed to that ideal. Ameri- 
can plutocracy has never got itself respected like English 
aristocracy. Citizenship is the American ideal; and it 
has never been the English ideal. But it is surely an ideal 



WHAT IS AMERICA? 17 

that may stir some imaginative generosity and respect 
in an Englishman, if he will condescend to be also a man. 
In this vision of moulding many peoples into the visible 
image of the citizen, he may see a spiritual adventure 
which he can admire from the outside at least as much as 
he admires the valour of the Moslems and much more 
than he admires the virtue of the Middle Ages. He 
need not set himself to develop equality, but he need not 
set himself to misunderstand it. He may at least imder- 
stand what Jefferson and Lincoln meant, and he may pos- 
sibly find some assistance in this task by reading what 
they said. He may realise that equality is not some«crude 
fairy tale about all men being equally tall or equally 
tricky; which we not only cannot believe but cannot 
believe in anybody believing. It is an absolute of morals 
by which all men have a value invariable and indestruct- 
ible and a dignity as intangible as death. He may at 
least be a philosopher and see that equality is an idea; 
and not merely one of these soft-headed sceptics who, 
having risen by low tricks to high places, drink bad 
champagne in tawdry hotel lounges, and tell each other 
twenty times over, with unwearied iteration, that equal- 
ity is an illusion. 

In truth it is inequality that is the illusion. The 
extreme disproportion between men, that we seem to 
see in life, is a thing of changing lights and lengthening 
shadows, a twilight full of fancies and distortions. We 
find a man famous and cannot live long enough to find 
him forgotten ; we see a race dominant and cannot linger 
to see it decay. It is the experience of men that always 
returns to the equality of men; it is the average that 
ultimately justifies the average man. It is when men 
have seen and suffered much and come at the end of 



i8 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

more elaborate experiments, that they see men under an 
equal light of death and daily laughter; and none the less 
mysterious for being many. Nor is it in vain that these 
Western democrats have sought the blazonry of their 
flag in that great multitude of immortal lights that en- 
dure behind the fires we see, and gathered them into the 
corner of Old Glory whose ground is like the glittering 
night. 'For veritably, in the spirit as well as in the 
symbol, suns and moons and meteors pass and fill our 
skies with a fleeting and almost theatrical conflagration; 
and wherever the old shadow stoops upon the earth, the 
stars return. 



A MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 

ALL this must begin with an apology and not an 
apologia. When I went wandering about the 
States disguised as a lecturer, I was well aware 
that I was not sufficiently well disguised to be a spy. I 
was even in the worst possible position to be a sight-seer. 
A lecturer to American audiences can hardly be in the 
holiday mood of a sight-seer. It is rather the au- 
dience that is sight-seeing; even if it is seeing a 
rather melancholy sight. Some say that people come 
to see the lecturer and not to hear him; in which case 
it seems rather a pity that he should disturb and dis- 
tress their minds with a lecture. He might merely ex- 
hibit himself on a stand or platform for a stipulated 
sum; or be exhibited like a monster in a menagerie. 
The circus elephant is not expected to make a speech. 
But it is equally true that the circus elephant is 
not allowed to write a book. His impressions of 
travel would be somewhat sketchy and perhaps a little 
over-specialised. In merely travelHng from circus to 
circus he w^ould, so to speak, move in rather narrow 
circles. Jumbo the great elephant (with whom I am 
hardly so ambitious as to compare myself), before he 
eventually went to the Barnum show, passed a consider- 
able and I trust happy part of his life in the Regent's 
Park. But if he had written a book on England, 
founded on his impressions of the Zoo, it might have 
been a little disproportionate and even misleading in its 
version of the flora and fauna of that country. He 
might imagine that lions and leopards were commoner 

19 



20 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

than they are in our hedgerows and country lanes, or 
that the head and neck of a giraffe was as native to our 
landscapes as a village spire. And that is why I apolo- 
gise in anticipation for a probable lack of proportion in 
this work. Like the elephant, I may have seen too 
much of a special enclosure where a special sort of lions 
are gathered together. I may exaggerate the territorial, 
as distinct from the vertical space occupied by the spirit- 
ual giraffe ; for the giraffe may surely be regarded as an 
example of Uplift, and is even, in a manner of speaking, 
a high-brow. Above all, I shall probably make generali- 
sations that are much too general; and are insufficient 
through being exaggerative. To this sort of doubt all 
my impressions are subject; and among them the 
negative generalisation with which I shall begin this 
rambling meditation on American hotels. 

In all my American wanderings I never saw such a 
thing as an inn. They may exist ; but they do not arrest 
the traveller upon every road as they do in England and 
in Europe. The saloons no longer existed when I was 
there, owing to the recent reform which restricted intoxi- 
cants to the wealthier classes. But we feel that the 
saloons have been there; if one maay so express it, their 
absence is still present. They remain in the structure of 
the streets and the idiom of the language. But the 
saloons were not inns. If they had been inns, it would 
have been far harder even for the power of modern 
plutocracy to root them out. There will be a very 
different chase when the White Hart is hunted to the 
forests or when the Red Lion turns to bay. But people 
could not feel about the American saloon as they will 
feel about the English inns. They could not feel that 
the Prohibitionist, that vulgar chucker-out, was chucking 



MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 21 

Chaucer out of the Tabard and Shakespeare out of the 
Mermaid. In justice to the American Prohibitionists it 
must be realised that they were no^ doing quite such 
desecration; and that many of them felt the saloon a 
specially poisonous sort of place. They did feel that 
drinking-places were used only as drug-shops. So they 
have effected the great reconstruction, by which it will be 
necessary to use only drug-shops as drinking-places. 
But I am not dealing here with the problem of Prohi- 
bition except in so far as it is involved in the statement 
that the saloons were in no sense inns. Secondly, of 
course, there are the hotels. There are indeed. There 
are hotels toppling to the stars, hotels covering the acre- 
age of villages, hotels in multitudinous number like a 
mob of Babylonian or Assyrian monuments; but the 
hotels also are not inns. 

Broadly speaking, there is only one hotel in America. 
The pattern of it, which is a very rational pattern, is 
repeated in cities as remote from each other as the 
capitals of European empires. You may find that hotel 
rising among the red blooms of the warm spring woods 
of Nebraska, or whitened with Canadian snows near the 
eternal noise of Niagara. And before touching on this 
solid and simple pattern itself, I may remark that the same 
system of symmetry runs through all the details of the 
interior. As one hotel is like another hotel, so one hotel 
floor is like another hotel floor. If the passage outside 
your bedroom door, or hallway as it is called, contains, 
let us say, a small table with a- green vase and a stuffed 
flamingo, or some trifle of the sort, you may be perfectly 
icertain that there is exactly the same table, vase, and 
flamingo on every one of the thirty-two landings of that 
towering habitation. This is where it differs most 



22 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

perhaps from the crooking landings and unexpected 
levels of the old English inns, even when they call them- 
selves hotels. To me there was something weird, like a 
magic multiplication, in the exquisite sameness of these 
suites. It seemed to suggest the still atmosphere of 
some eerie psychological story. I once myself enter- 
tained the notion of a story, in which a man was to be 
prevented from entering his house (the scene of some 
crime or calamity) by people who painted and furnished 
the next house to look exactly like it; the assimilation 
going to the most fantastic lengths, such as altering the 
numbering of houses in the street. I came to America 
and found an hotel fitted and upholstered throughout for 
the enactment of my phantasmal fraud. I offer the 
skeleton of my story with all humility to some of the 
admirable lady writers of detective stories in America, to 
Miss Carolyn Wells, or Miss Mary Roberts Rinehart, or 
Mrs. A. K. Green of the unforgotten Leavenworth Case. 
Surely it might be possible for the unsophisticated Nim- 
rod K. Moose, of Yellow Dog Flat, to come to New 
York and be entangled somehow in this net of repetitions 
or recurrences. Surely something tells me that his 
beautiful daughter, the Rose of Red Murder Gulch, might 
seek for him in vain amid the apparently unmistakable 
surroundings of the thirty-second floor, while he was 
being quietly butchered by the floor-clerk on the thirty- 
third floor, an agent of the Green Claw (that formidable 
organisation) ; and all because the two floors looked 
exactly alike to the virginal Western eye. The original 
point of my own story was that the man to be entrapped 
walked into his own house after all, in spite of it being 
differently painted and numjtered, simply because he was 
absent-minded and used to taking a certain number of 



MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTED 23 

mechanical steps. This would not work in a hotel; 
because a lift has no habits. It is typical of the real 
tameness of machinery, that even when we talk of a man 
turning mechanically we only talk metaphorically; for it 
is something that a mechanism cannot do. But I think 
there is only one real objection to my story of Mr. Moose 
in the New York hotel. And that is unfortunately a 
rather fatal one. It is that far away in the remote des- 
olation of Yellow Dog, among those outlying and out- 
landish rocks that almost seem to rise beyond the sunset, 
there is undoubtedly an hotel of exactly the same sort, 
with all its floors exactly the same. 

Anyhow the general plan of the American hotel is com- 
monly the same, and, as I have said, it is a very sound 
one so far as it goes. When I first went into one of the 
big New York hotels, the first impression was certainly 
its bigness. It was called the Biltmore ; and I wondered 
how many national humorists had made the obvious com- 
ment of wishing they had built less. But it was not 
merely the Babylonian size and scale of such things, it 
was the way in which they are used. They are used al- 
most as public streets, or rather as public squares. My 
first impression was that I was in some sort of high street 
or market-place during a carnival or a revolution. True, 
the people looked rather rich for a revolution and rather 
grave for a carnival; but they were congested in great 
crowds that moved slowly like people passing through an 
overcrowded railway station. Even in the dizzy heights 
of such a sky-scraper there could not possibly be room for 
all those people to sleep in the hotel, or even to dine in it. 
And, as a matter of fact, they did nothing whatever ex- 
cept drift into it and drift out again. Most of them had 
no more to do with the hotel than I have with Bucking- 



24 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

ham Palace. I have never been in Buckingham Palace, 
and I have very seldom, thank God, been in the big hotels 
of this type that exist in London or Paris. But I cannot 
believe that mobs are perpetually pouring through the 
Hotel Cecil or the Savoy in this fashion, calmly coming 
in at one door and going out of the other. But this fact 
is part of the fundamental structure of the American 
hotel ; it is built upon a compromise that makes it possible. 
The whole of the lower floor is thrown open to the public 
streets and treated as a public square. But above it and 
all round it runs another floor in the form of a sort of 
deep gallery, furnished more luxuriously and looking 
down on the moving mobs beneath. No one is allowed 
on this floor except the guests or clients of the hotel. 
As I have been one of them myself, I trust it is not un- 
sympathetic to compare them to active anthropoids who 
can climb trees, and so look down in safety on the herds 
or packs of wilder animals wandering and prowling 
below. Of course there are modifications of architect- 
ural plan, but they are generally approximations to it; 
it is the plan that seems to suit the social Hfe of the 
American cities. There is generally something like a 
ground floor that is more public, a half -floor or gallery 
above that is more private, and above that the bulk of 
the block of bedrooms, the huge hive with its innumer- 
able and identical cells. 

The ladder of ascent in this tower is of course the Uft, 
or, as it is called, the elevator. With all that we hear oi 
American hustle and hurry, it is rather strange that 
Americans seem to like more than we do to linger upon 
long words. And indeed there is an element of delay in 
their diction and spirit, very little understood, which I 
may discuss elsewhere. Anyhow they say elevator when 



MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 25 

we say lift, just as they say automobile when we say 
motor and stenographer when we say typist, or sometimes 
(by a sHght confusion) typewriter. Which reminds me 
of another story that never existed, about a man who was 
accused of having murdered and dismembered his secre- 
tary when he had only taken his typing machine to pieces ; 
but we must not dwell on these digressions. The Ameri- 
cans may have another reason for giving long and cere- 
monious titles to the lift. When first I came among them 
I had a suspicion that they possessed and practised a new 
and secret religion, which was the cult of the elevator. 
I fancied they worshipped the lift, or at any rate wor- 
shipped in the lift. The details or data of this suspicion 
it were now vain to collect, as I have regretfully aban- 
doned it, except in so far as they illustrate the social prin- 
ciples underlying the structural plan of the building. 
N(?w an American gentleman invariably takes off his hat 
in the lift. He does not take off his hat in the hotel, even 
if it is crowded with ladies. But he always so salutes a 
lady in the elevator ; and this marks the difference of at- 
mosphere. The lift is a room, but the hotel is a street. 
But during my first delusion, of course, I assumed that he 
uncovered in this tiny temple merely because he was in 
church. There is something about the very word eleva- 
tor that expresses a great deal of his vague but idealistic 
religion. Perhaps that flying chapel will eventually be 
ritualistically decorated like a chapel ; possibly with a sym- 
bolic scheme of wings. Perhaps a brief religious service 
will be held in the elevator as it ascends; in a few well- 
chosen words touching the Utmost for the Highest. 
Possibly he would consent even to call the elevator a lift, 
if he could call it an uplift. There would be no diffi- 
culty, except what I cannot but regard as the chief moral 



26 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

problem of all optimistic modernism. I mean the diffi- 
culty of imagining a lift which is free to go up, if it 
is not also free to go down. 

I think I know my American friends and acquaint- 
ances too well to apologise for any levity in these illus- 
trations. Americans make fun of their own institutions ; 
and their own journalism is full of such fanciful conjec- 
tures. The tall building is itself artistically akin to the 
tall story. The very word skyscraper is an admirable 
example of an American lie. But I can testify quite 
as eagerly to the solid and sensible advantages of the 
symmetrical hotel. It is not only a pattern of vases 
and stuffed flamingoes; it is also an equally accurate 
pattern of cupboards and baths. It is a dignified and 
humane custom to have a bathroom attached to every 
bedroom ; and my impulse to sing the praises of it brought 
me once at least into a rather quaint complication. I 
think it was in the city of Dayton; anyhow I remember 
there was a Laundry Convention going on in the same 
hotel, in a room very patriotically and properly festooned 
with the stars and stripes, and doubtless full of promise 
for the future of laundering. I was interviewed on the 
roof, within earshot of this debate, and may have been 
the victim of some association or confusion; anyhow, 
after answering the usual questions about Labour, the 
League of Nations, the length of ladies' dresses, and 
other great matters, I took refuge in a rhapsody of warm 
and well-deserved praise of American bathrooms. The 
editor, I understand, running a gloomy eye down the 
column of his contributor's 'story,' and seeing nothing 
but metaphysical terms such as justice, freedom, the ab- 
stract disapproval of sweating, swindling, and the like, 
paused at last upon the ablutionary allusion, and his eye 



MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 27 

brightened. ^That's the only copy in the whole thing/ 
he said, *A Bath-Tub in Every Home/ So these words 
appeared in enormous letters above my portrait in the 
paper. It will be noted that, like many things that 
practical men make a great point of, they miss the point. 
What I had commended as new and national was a 
bathroom in every bedroom. Even feudal and moss- 
grown England is not entirely ignorant of an occasional 
bath-tub in the home. But what gave me great joy was 
what followed. I discovered with delight that many 
people, glancing rapidly at my portrait with its prodig- 
ious legend, imagined that it was a commercial advertise- 
ment, and that I was a very self-advertising commercial 
traveller. When I walked about the streets, I was sup- 
posed to be travelling in bath-tubs. Consider the caption 
of the portrait, and you will see how similar it is to the 
true commercial slogan : 'We offer a Bath-Tub in Every 
Home.' And this charming error was doubtless clinched 
by the fact that I had been found haunting the outer 
courts of the temple of the ancient guild of Lavenders. 
I never knew how many shared the impression ; I regret 
to say that I only traced it with certainty in two individ- 
uals. But I understand that it included the idea that I 
had come to the town to attend the Laundry Convention, 
and had made an eloquent speech to that senate, no doubt 
exhibiting my tubs. 

Such was the penalty of too passionate and unre- 
strained an admiration for American bathrooms; yet 
the connection of ideas, however inconsequent, does cover 
the part of social practice for which these American 
institutions can really be praised. About everything like 
laundry or hot and cold water there is not only organ- 
isation, but what does not always or perhaps often go with 



28 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

it, efficiency. Americans are particular about these things 
of dress and decorum; and it is a virtue which I very 
seriously recognise, though I find it very hard to emulate. 
But with them it is a virtue ; it is not a mere convention, 
still less a mere fashion. It is really related to human 
dignity rather than to social superiority. The really 
glorious thing about the American is that he does not 
dress like a gentleman; he dresses like a citizen or a 
civilised man. Puritan particularity on certain points 
is really detachable from any definite social ambitions; 
these things are not a part of getting into society but 
merely of keeping out of savagery. Those millions 
and millions of middling people, that huge middle class 
especially of the Middle West, are not near enough to 
any aristocracy even to be sham aristocrats, or to be real 
snobs. But their standards are secure; and though I 
do not really travel in a bath-tub, or believe in the bath- 
tub philosophy and religion, I will not on this matter 
recoil misanthropically from them: I prefer the tub of 
Dayton to the tub of Diogenes. On these points there 
is really something a million times better than efficiency, 
and that is something like equality. 

In short, the American hotel is not America; but it is 
American. In some respects it is as American as the 
English inn is English. And it is symbolic of that 
society in this among other things : that it does tend 
too much to uniformity; but that that very uniformity 
disguises not a Httle natural dignity. The old Romans 
boasted that their republic was a nation of kings. If 
we really walked abroad in such a kingdom, we might 
very well grow tired of the sight of a crowd of kings, 
of every man with a gold crown on his head or an ivory 
sceptre in his hand. But it is arguable that we ought not 



/ 



MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 29 

to grow tired of the repetition of crowns and sceptres, 
any more than of the repetition of flowers and stars. 
The whole imaginative effort of Walt Whitman was really 
an effort to absorb and animate these multitudinous 
modern repetitions; and Walt Whitman would be quite 
capable of including in his lyric litany of optimism a 
list of the nine hundred and ninety-nine identical bath- 
rooms. I do not sneer at the generous effort of the 
giant ; though I think, when all is said, that it is criticism 
of modern machinery that the effort should be gigantic 
as well as generous. 

While there is so much repetition there is little repose. 
It is the pattern of a kaleidoscope rather than a wall- 
paper; a pattern of figures running and even leaping 
like the figures in a zoetrope. But even in the groups 
where there was no hustle there was often something 
of homelessness. I do not mean merely that they were 
not dining at home; but rather that they were not at 
home even when dining, and dining at their favourite 
hotel. They would frequently start up and dart from 
the room at a summons from the telephone. It may 
have been fanciful, but I could not help feeling a breath 
of home, as from a flap or flutter of St. George's 
cross, when I first sat down in a Canadian hostelry, and 
read the announcement that no such telephonic or other 
summonses were allowed in the dining-room. It may 
have been a coincidence, and there may be American 
hotels with this merciful proviso and Canadian hotels 
without it; but the thing was symbolic even if it was not 
evidential. I felt as if I stood indeed upon English 
soil, in a place where people liked to have their meals in 
peace. 

The process of the summons is called 'paging,' and 



30 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

consists of sending a little boy with a large voice through 
all the halls and corridors of the building, making them 
resound with a name. The custom is common, of course, 
in clubs and hotels even in England; but in England it is 
a mere whisper compared with the wail with which the 
American page repeats the formula of ^Calling Mr. So 
and So.' I remember a particularly crowded parterre in 
the somewhat smoky and oppressive atmosphere of 
Pittsburg, through which wandered a youth with a voice 
the like of which I have never heard in the land of the 
living, a voice like the cry of a lost spirit, saying again 
and again for ever, *Carling Mr. Anderson.' One felt 
that he never would find Mr. Anderson. Perhaps there 
never had been any Mr. Anderson to be found. Perhaps 
he and every one else wandered in an abyss of bottom- 
less scepticism; and he was but the victim of one out of 
numberless nightmares of eternity, as he wandered a 
shadow with shadows and wailed by impassable streams. 
This is not exactly my philosophy, but I feel sure it was 
his. And it is a mood that may frequently visit the 
mind in the centres of highly active and successful in- 
dustrial civilisation. 

Such are the first idle impressions of the great Ameri- 
can hotel, gained by sitting for the first time in its gallery 
and gazing on its drifting crowds with thoughts equally 
drifting. The first impression is of something enormous 
and rather unnatural, an impression that is gradually 
tempered by experience of the kindliness and even the 
tameness of so much of that social order. But I should 
not be recording the sensations with sincerity, if I did not 
touch in passing the note of something unearthly about 
<that vast system to an insular traveller who sees it for the 
first time. It is as if he were wandering in another 



MEDITATION IN A NEW YORK HOTEL 31 

world among the fixed stars; or worse still, in an ideal 
Utopia of the future. 

Yet I am not certain ; and perhaps the best of all news 
is that nothing is really new. I sometimes have a fancy 
that many of these new things in new countries are but 
the resurrections of old things which have been wickedly 
killed or stupidly stunted in old countries. I have looked 
over the sea of little tables in some light and airy open- 
air cafe; and my thoughts have gone back to the plain 
wooden bench and wooden table that stands solitary and 
weather-stained outside so many neglected English inns. 
We talk of experimenting in the French cafe, as of some 
fresh and almost impudent innovation. But our fathers 
had the French cafe, in the sense of the free-and-easy 
table in the sun and air. The only difference was that 
French democracy was allowed to develop its cafe, or 
multiply its tables, while English plutocracy prevented 
any such popular growth. Perhaps there are other ex- 
amples of old types and patterns, lost in the old oligarchy 
and saved in the new democracies. I am haunted with 
a hint that the new structures are not so very new: and 
that they remind me of something very old. As I look 
from the balcony floors the crowds seem to float away 
and the colours to soften and grow pale, and I know 
I am in one of the simplest and most ancestral of 
human habitations. I am looking down from the old 
wooden gallery upon the courtyard of an inn. This 
new architectural model, which I have described, is after 
all one of the oldest European models, now neglected in 
Europe and especially in England. It was the theatre 
in which were enchanted innumerable picaresque com- 
edies and romantic plays, with figures ranging from 
Sancho Panza to Sam Weller. It served as the appa- 



I 



32 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

ratus, like some gigantic toy set up in bricks and timber, 
for the ancient and perhaps eternal game of tennis. The 
very terms of the original game were taken from the 
inn courtyard, and the players scored accordingly as they 
hit the buttery-hatch or the roof. Singular speculations 
hover in my mind as the scene darkens and the quad- 
rangle below begins to empty in the last hours of night. 
Some day perhaps this huge structure will be found 
standing in a solitude like a skeleton; and it will be the 
skeleton of the Spotted Dog or the Blue Boar. It will 
wither and decay until it is worthy at last to be a tavern. 
I do not know whether men will play tennis on its ground 
floor, with various scores and prizes for hitting the elec- 
tric fan, or the lift, dr the head waiter. Perhaps the very 
words will only remain as part of some such rustic 
game. Perhaps the electric fan will no longer be elec- 
tric and the elevator will no longer elevate, and the 
waiter will only wait to be hit. But at least it is only 
by the decay of modern plutocracy, which seems already 
to have begun, that the secret of the structure even of 
this plutocratic palace can stand revealed. And after 
long years, when its lights are extinguished and only the 
long shadows inhabit its halls and vestibules, there may 
come a new noise like thunder ; of D'Artagnan knocking 
at the door. 



A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 

WHEN I had looked at the lights of Broad- 
way by night, I rrfade to my American 
friends an innocent remark that seemed for 
some reason to amuse them. I had looked, not without 
joy, at that long kaleidoscope of coloured lights arranged 
in large letters and sprawling trade-marks, advertising 
everything, from pork to pianos, through the agency 
of the two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts 
of God ; colour and fire. I said to them, in my simplicity, 
*What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, 
to any one who was lucky enough to be unable to 
read.' 

Here it is but a text for a further suggestion. But 
let us suppose that there does walk down this flaming 
avenue a peasant, of the sort called scornfully an illiter- 
ate peasant ; by those who think that insisting on .people 
reading and writing is the best way to keep out the spies 
who read in all languages and the forgers who write 
in all hands. On this principle indeed, a peasant merely 
acquainted with things of little practical use to mankind, 
such as ploughing, cutting wood, or growing vegetables, 
would very probably be excluded ; and it is not for us to 
criticise from the outside the philosophy of those who 
would keep out the farmer and let in the forger. But 
let us suppose, if only for the sake of argument, that 
the peasant is walking under the artificial suns and 
stars of this tremendous thoroughfare; that he has es- 
caped to the land of liberty upon some general rumour 
and romance of the story of its liberation, but without 

33 



34 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

being yet able to understand the arbitrary signs of its 
alphabet. The soul of such a man would surely soar 
higher than the sky-scrapers, and embrace a brotherhood 
broader than Broadway. Realising that he had arrived 
on an evening of exceptional festivity, worthy to be bla- 
zoned with all this burning heraldry, he would please 
himself by guessing what great proclamation or prin- 
ciple of the Republic hung in the sky like a constellation 
or rippled across the street like a comet. He would be 
shrewd enough to guess that the three festoons fringed 
with fiery words of somewhat similar pattern stood for 
'Government of the People, For the People, By the 
People'; for it must obviously be that, unless it were 
'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.' His shrewdness would 
perhaps be a little shaken if he knew that the triad stood 
for *Tang Tonic To-day; Tang Tonic To-morrow; 
Tang Tonic All the Time.* He will soon identify a 
restless ribbon of red lettering, red hot and rebellious, 
as the saying, 'Give me liberty or give me death.' He 
will "fail to identify it as the equally famous saying, 
Skyoline Has Gout Beaten to a Frazzle.' Therefore it 
was that I desired the peasant to walk down that grove 
of fiery trees, under all that golden foliage and fruits 
like monstrous jewels, as innocent as Adam before the 
Fall. He would see sights almost as fine as the flaming 
sword or the purple and peacock plumage of the sera- 
phim; so long as he did not go near the Tree of 
Knowledge. 

In other words, if once he went to school it would be 
all up ; and indeed I fear in any case he would soon 
discover his error. If he stood wildly waving his hat 
for liberty in the middle of the road as Chunk Chutney 
picked itself out in ruby stars upon the sky, he would 



A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 35 

impede the excellent but extremely rigid traffic system 
of New York. If he fell on his knees before a sapphire 
splendour, and began saying an Ave Maria under a 
mistaken association, he would be conducted kindly but 
iirmly by an Irish policeman to a more authentic shrine. 
But though the foreign simplicity might not long survive 
in New York, it is quite a mistake to suppose that such 
foreign simplicity cannot enter New York. He may be 
excluded for being illiterate, but he cannot be excluded 
for being ignorant, nor for being innocent. Least of 
all can he be excluded for being wiser in his innocence 
than the world in its knowledge. There is here indeed 
more than one distinction to be made. New York is a 
cosmopolitan city; but it is not a city of cosmopolitans. 
Most of the masses in New York have a nation, whether 
or no it be the nation to which New York belongs. 
.Those who are Americanised are American, and very 
patriotically American. Those who are not thus nation- 
alised are not in the least internationalised. They 
simply continue to be themselves; the Irish are Irish; 
the Jews are Jewish; and all sorts of other tribes carry 
on the traditions of remote European valleys almost un- 
touched. In short, there is a sort of slender bridge 
between their old country and their new, which they 
either cross or do not cross, but which they seldom simply 
occupy. They are exiles or they are citizens ; there is no 
moment when they are cosmopolitans. But very often 
the exiles bring with them not only rooted traditions, 
but rooted truths. 

Indeed it is to a great extent the thought of these 
strange souls in crude American garb that gives a 
meaning to the masquerade of New York. In the hotel 
where I stayed the head waiter in one room was a 



36 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

Bohemian; and I am glad to say that he called himself 
a Bohemian. I have already protested sufficiently, 
before American audiences, against the pedantry of 
perpetually talking about Czecho-Slovakia. I suggested 
to my American friends that the abandonment of the 
word Bohemian in its historical sense might well extend 
to its literary and figurative sense. We might be 
expected to say, ^I'm afraid Henry has got into very 
Czecho-Slovakian habits lately,* or *Don't bother to 
dress; it's quite a Czecho-Slovakian affair.' Anyhow 
my Bohemian would have nothing to do with such non- 
sense; he called himself a son of Bohemia, and spoke as 
such in his criticisms of America, which were both fa- 
vourable and unfavourable. He was a squat man, with a 
sturdy figure and a steady smile; and his eyes were like 
dark pools in the depth of a darker forest; but I do not 
think he had ever been deceived by the lights of 
Broadway. 

But I found something like my real innocent abroad, 
my real peasant among the sky-signs, in another part of 
the same establishment. He was a much leaner man, 
equally dark, with a hook nose, hungry face, and fierce 
black moustaches. He also was a waiter, and was in the 
costume of a waiter, which is a smarter edition of the 
costume of a lecturer. As he was serving me with clam 
chowder or some such thing, I fell into speech with him 
and he told me he was a Bulgar. I said something like, 
'I'm afraid I don't know as much as I ought to about 
Bulgaria. I suppose most of your people are agricul- 
tural, aren't they?' He did not stir an inch from his 
regular attitude, but he slightly lowered his low voice 
and said, 'Yes. From the earth we come and to the 



A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 37 

earth we return; when people get away from that they 
are lost.' ; 

To hear such a thing said by the waiter was alone an 
epoch in the life of an unfortunate writer of fantastic 
novels. To see him clear away the clam chowder like 
an automaton, and bring me more iced water like an 
automaton or like nothing on earth except an American 
waiter (for piling up ice is the cold passion of their 
lives), and all this after having uttered something so 
dark and deep, so starkly incongruous and so startlingly 
true, was an indescribable thing, but very like the 
picture of the peasant admiring Broadway. So he 
passed, with his artificial clothes and manners, lit up 
with all the ghastly artificial light of the hotel, and all 
the ghastly artificial Hfe of the city; and his heart was 
like his own remote and rocky valley, where those un- 
changing words were carved as on a rock. 

I do not profess to discuss here at all adequately the 
question this raises about the Americanisation of the 
Bulgar. It has many aspects, of some of which most 
Englishmen and even some Americans are rather un- 
conscious. For one thing, a man with so rugged a 
loyalty to land could not be Americanised in New York ; 
but it is not so certain that he could not be Americanised 
in America. We might almost say that a peasantry is 
hidden in the heart of America. So far as our impres- 
sions go, it is a secret. It is rather an open secret ; cover- 
ing only some thousand square miles of open prairie. 
But for most of our countrymen it is something invis- 
ible, unimagined, and unvisited; the simple truth that 
where all those acres are there is agriculture, and where 
all that agriculture is there is considerable tendency 



38 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

towards distributive or decently equalised property, as in 
a peasantry. On the other hand, there are those who 
say that the Bulgar will never be Americanised, that he 
only comes to be a waiter in America that he may afford 
to return to be a peasant in Bulgaria. I cannot decide 
this issue, and indeed I did not introduce it to this end. 
I was led to it by a certain line of reflection that runs 
along the Great White Way, and I will continue to 
follow it. The criticism, if we could put it rightly, not 
only covers more than New York but more than the 
whole New World. Any argument against it is quite as 
valid against the largest and richest cities of the Old 
W^orld, against London or Liverpool or Frankfort or 
Belfast. But it is in New York that we see the argu- 
ment most clearly, because we see the thing thus towering 
into its own turrets and breaking into its own fire- 
works. 

I disagree with the aesthetic condemnation of the 
modern city with its sky-scrapers and sky-signs. I 
mean that which laments the loss of beauty and its sac- 
rifice to utility. It seems to me the very reverse of the 
truth. Years ago, when people used to say the Sal- 
vation Army doubtless had good intentions, but we 
must all deplore its methods, I pointed* out that the very 
contrary is the case. Its method, the method of drums 
and democratic appeal, is that of the Franciscans or 
any other march of the Church Militant. It was pre- 
cisely its aims that were dubious, with their dissenting 
morality and despotic finance. It is somewhat the same 
v^ith things like the sky-signs in Broadway. The aes- 
thete must not ask me to mingle my tears with his, be- 
cause these things are merely useful and ugly. For I 
am not specially inclined to think them ugly; but I am 



A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 39 

strongly inclined to think them useless. As a matter 
of art for art's sake, they seem to me rather artistic. 
As a form of practical social work they seem to me 
stark stupid waste. If Mr. Bilge is rich eliough to 
build a tower four hundred feet high and give It 
a crown of golden crescents and crimson stars, in order 
to draw attention to his manufacture of the Paradise 
Tooth Paste or the Seventh Heaven Cigar, I do not 
feel the least disposition to thank him for any serious 
form of social service. I have never tried the Seventh 
Heaven Cigar; indeed a premonition moves me towards 
the belief that I shall go down to the dust without trying 
it. I have every reason to doubt whether It does any par- 
ticular good to those who smoke it, or any good to any- 
body except those who sell it. In short Mr. Bilge's 
usefulness consists In being useful to Mr. Bilge, and all 
the rest is Illusion and sentimentalism. But because 
I know that Bilge Is only Bilge, shall I stoop to the pro- 
fanity of saying that fire Is only fire? Shall I blas- 
pheme crimson stars any more than crimson sunsets, 
or deny that those moons are golden any more than 
that this grass Is green? If a child saw these coloured 
lights, he would dance with as much delight as at any 
other coloured toys; and It is the duty of every poet, 
and even of every critic, to dance In respectful imita- 
tion of the child. Indeed I am In a mood of so much 
sympathy with the fairy lights of this pantomime city, 
that I should be almost sorry to see social sanity and a 
sense of proportion return to extinguish them. I 
fear the day is breaking, and the broad daylight of 
tradition and ancient truth Is coming to end all this 
delightful nightmare of New York at night. Peas- 
ants and priests and all sorts of practical and sensible 



40 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

people are coming back into power, and their stern 
realism may wither all these beautiful, unsubstantial, 
useless things. They will not believe in the Seventh 
Heaven Cigar, even when they see it shining as with 
stars in the seventh heaven. They will not be affected 
by advertisements, any more than the priests and peas- 
ants of the Middle Ages would have been affected by 
advertisements. Only a very soft-headed, sentimental 
and rather servile generation of men could possibly 
be affected by advertisements at all. People who are 
a little more hard-headed, humorous, and intellectually 
independent, see the rather simple joke; and are not 
impressed by this or any other form' of self-praise. 
Almost any other men in almost any other age would 
have seen the joke. If you had said to a man in the 
Stone Age, *Ugg says Ugg makes the best stone hatch- 
ets,' he would have perceived a lack of detachment 
and disinterestedness about the testimonial. If you 
had said to a medieval peasant, 'Robert the Bowyer 
proclaims, with three blasts of a horn, that he makes 
good bows,' the peasant would have said, 'Well, of 
course he does,' and thought about something more im- 
portant. It is only among people whose minds have 
been weakened by a sort of mesmerism that so trans- 
parent a trick as that of advertisement could ever have 
been tried at all. And if ever we have again, as for 
other reasons I cannot but hope we shall, a more 
democratic distribution of property and a more agri- 
cultural basis of national life, it would seem at first 
sight only too likely that all this beautiful superstition 
will perish, and the fairyland of Broadway with all 
its varied rainbows fade away. For such people the 
Seventh Heaven Cigar, like the nineteenth-century 



A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 41 

city, will have ended in smoke. And even the smoke 
of it will have vanished, 

But the next stage of reflection brings us back to 
the peasant looking at the lights of Broadway. It is 
not true to say in the strict sense that the peasant has 
never seen such things before. The truth is that he 
has seen them on a much smaller scale, but for a much 
larger purpose. Peasants also have their ritual and 
ornament, but it is to adorn more real things. Apart 
from our first fancy about the peasant who could not 
read, there is no doubt about what would be apparent 
to a peasant who could read, and who could under- 
stand. For him also fire is sacred, for him also colour 
is symbolic. But where he sets up a candle to light the 
little shrine of St. Joseph, he finds it takes twelve hundred 
candles to light the Seventh Heaven Cigar. He is used 
to the colours in church windows showing red for 
martyrs or blue for madonnas; but here he can only 
conclude that all the colours of the rainbow belong to 
Mr. Bilge. Now upon the aesthetic side he might well 
be impressed; but it is exactly on the social and even 
scientific side that he has a right to criticise. If he were 
a Chinese peasant, for instance, and came from a land 
of fireworks, he would naturally suppose that he had 
happened to arrive at a great fireworks display in cele- 
bration of something; perhaps the Sacred Emperor's 
birthday, or rather birthnight. It would gradually dawn 
on the Chinese philosopher that the Emperor could hardly 
be born every night. And when he learnt the truth the 
philosopher, if he was a philosopher, would be a little 
disappointed . . . possibly a little disdainful. 

Compare, for instance, these everlasting fireworks 
with the damp squibs and dying bonfires of Guy Fawkes 



42 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

Day. That quaint and even queer national festival has 
been fading for some time out of English life. Still, it 
was a national festival, in the double sense that it rep- 
resented some sort of public spirit pursued by some sort 
of popular impulse. People spent money on the display 
of fireworks; they did not get money by it. And the 
people who spent money were often those who had very 
little money to spend. It had something of the 
glorious and fanatical character of making the poor 
•poorer. It did not, like the advertisements, have only the 
mean and materialistic character of making the rich 
richer. In short, it came from the people and it ap- 
pealed to the nation. The historical and religious cause 
in which it originated is not mine; and I think it has 
perished partly through being tied to a historical theory 
for which there is no future. I think this is illustrated 
in the very fact that the ceremonial is merely negative 
and destructive. Negation and destruction are very 
noble things as far as they go, and when they go in the 
right direction; and the popular expression of them has 
always something hearty and human about it. I shall 
not therefore bring any fine or fastidious criticism, 
whether literary or musical, to bear upon the little boys 
who drag about a bolster and a paper mask, calling out 

Guy Fawkes Guy 
Hit him in the eye. 

But I admit it is a disadvantage that they have not a 
saint or hero to crown in effigy as well as a traitor to 
burn in effigy. I admit that popular Protestantism has 
become too purely negative for people to wreathe in 
flowers the statue of Mr. Kensit or even of Dr. Clifford. 
I do not disguise my preference for popular Catholicism; 



A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 43 

which still has statues that can be wreathed in flowers. 
I wish our national feast of fireworks revolved round 
something positive and popular. I wish the beauty of 
a Catherine Wheel were displayed to the glory of St. 
Catherine. I should not especially complain if Roman 
candles were really Roman candles. But this negative 
character does not destroy the national character; which 
began at least in disinterested faith and has ended at 
least in disinterested fun. There is nothing disin- 
terested at all about the new commercial fireworks. 
There is nothing so dignified as a dingy guy among the 
lights of Broadway. In that thoroughfare, indeed, the 
very word guy has another and milder significance. An 
American friend congratulated me on the impression I 
had produced on a lady interviewer, observing, 'She says 
you're a regular guy.' This puzzled me a little at the 
time. *Her description is no doubt correct,' I said, 'but 
I confess that it would never have struck me as specially 
complimentary.' But it appears that it is one of the most 
graceful of compliments, in the original American. A 
guy in America is a colourless term for a human being. 
All men are guys, being endowed by their Creator with 
certain . . . but I am misled by another association. 
And a regular guy means, I presume, a reliable or re- 
spectable guy. The point here, however, is that the guy 
in the grotesque English sense does represent the di- 
lapidated remnant of a real human tradition of sym- 
bolising real historic ideals by the sacramental mystery of 
fire. It is a great fall from the lowest of these lowly 
bonfires to the highest of the modern sky-signs. The new 
illumination does not stand for any national ideal at all ; 
and what is yet more to the point, it does not come from 
any popular enthusiasm at all. That is where it differs 



44 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

from the narrowest national Protestantism of the Eng- 
Hsh institution. Mobs have risen in support of No 
Popery; no mobs are likely to rise in defence of the New 
Puffery. Many a poor, crazy Orangeman has died say- 
ing, *To Hell with the Pope' ; it is doubtful whether any 
man will ever, with his last breath, frame the ecstatic 
words, 'Try Hugby's Chewing Gum.' These modern 
and mercantile legends are imposed upon us by a mer- 
cantile minority, and we are merely passive to the sug- 
gestion. The hypnotist of high finance or big business 
merely writes his commands in heaven with a finger of 
fire. All men really are guys, in the sense of dummies. 
We are only the victims of his pyrotechnic violence; and 
it is he who hits us in the eye. 

This is the real case against that modern society that 
rs symbolised by such art and architecture. It is not that 
it is toppling, but that it is top-heavy. It is not that it is 
vulgar, but rather that it is not popular. In other words, 
the democratic ideal of countries Hke America, while it is 
still generally sincere and sometimes intense, is at issue 
with another tendency, an industrial progress which is of 
all things on earth the most undemocratic. America is 
not alone in possessing the industrialism, but she is aione 
in emphasising the ideal that strives with industrialism. 
Industrial capitalism and ideal democracy are everywhere 
in controversy ; but perhaps only here are they in conflict. 
[France has a democratic ideal; but France is not indus- 
trial. England and Germany are industrial ; but England 
and Germany are not really democratic. Of course 
when I speak here of industrialism I speak of great in- 
dustrial areas ; there is, as will be noted later, another side 
to all these countries ; there is in America itself not only a 
great deal of agricultural society, but a great deal of 



A MEDITATION IN BROADWAY 45 

agricultural equality; just as there are still peasants in 
Germany and may some day again be peasants in Eng- 
land. But the point is that the ideal and its enemy the 
reality are here crushed very close to each other in the 
high, narrow city ; and that the sky-scraper is truly named 
because its top, towering in such insolence, is scraping 
the stars off the American sky, the very heaven of the 
American spirit. 

That seems to me the main outline of the whole prob- 
lem. In the first chapter of this book, I have emphasised 
the fact that equality is still the ideal though no longer 
the reality of America. I should like to conclude this 
one by emphasising the fact that the reality of modern 
capitalism is menacing that ideal with terrors and even 
splendours that might well stagger the wavering and im- 
pressionable modern spirit. Upon the issue of that 
struggle depends the question of whether this new great 
civilisation continues to exist, and even whether any one 
cares if it exists or not. I have already used the parable 
of the American flag, and the stars that stand for a multi- 
tudinous equality; I might here take the opposite symbol 
of these artificial and terrestrial stars flaming on the fore- 
head of the commercial city; and note the peril of the 
last illusion, which is that the artificial stars may seem to 
fill the heavens, and the real stars to have faded from 
sight. But I am content for the moment to reaffirm the 
merely imaginative pleasure of those dizzy turrets and 
dancing fires. If those nightmare buildings were really 
all built for nothing, how noble they would be! The 
fact that they were really built for something need not 
unduly depress us for a moment, or drag down our soar- 
ing fancies. There is something about these vertical lines 
that suggests a sort of rush upwards, as of great cataracts 



46 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

topsy-turvy. I have spoken of fireworks, but here I 
should rather speak of rockets. There is only some- 
thing underneath the mind murmuring that nothing re- 
mains at last of a flaming rocket except a falling stick. 
I have spoken of Babylonian perspectives, and of words 
written with a fiery finger, like that huge unhuman finger 
that wrote on Belshazzar's wall. . . . But what did it 
write on Belshazzar's wall ? ... I am content once more 
to end on a note of doubt and a rather dark sympathy 
with those many-coloured solar systems turning so 
dizzily, far up in the divine vacuum of the night. 

'From the earth we come and to the earth we return; 
when people get away from that they are lost.* 



IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 

IT is often asked what should be the first thing that a 
man sees when he lands in a foreign country ; but I 
think it should be the vision of his own country. 
At least when I came into New York Harbour, a sort of 
grey and green cloud came between me and the towers 
with multitudinous windows, white in the winter sun- 
light; and I saw an old brown house standing back 
among the beech-trees at home, the house of only one 
among many friends and neighbours, but one somehow 
so sunken in the very heart of England as to be uncon- 
scious of her imperial or international position, and out 
of sound of her perilous seas. But what made most 
clear the vision that revisited me was something else. 
Before we touched land the men of my own guild, the 
journalists and reporters, had already boarded the ship 
Hke pirates. And one of them spoke to me in an accent 
that I knew ; and thanked me for all I had done for Ire- 
land. And it was at that moment that I knew most 
vividly that what I wanted was to do something for 
England. 

Then, as it chanced, I looked across at the statue of 
Liberty, and saw that the great bronze was gleaming 
green in the morning light. I had made all the obvious 
jokes about the statue of Liberty. I found it had a 
soothing effect on earnest Prohibitionists on the boat to 
urge, as a point of dignity and delicacy, that it ought to 
be given back to the French, a vicious race abandoned 
to the culture of the vine. I proposed that the last 

47 



48 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

liquors on board should be poured out in a pagan libation 
before it. And then I suddenly remembered that this 
Liberty was still in some sense enlightening the world, 
or one part of the world; was a lamp for one sort of 
wanderer, a star of one sort of seafarer. To one perse- 
cuted people at least this land had really been an asylum ; 
even if recent legislation (as I have said) had made them 
think it a lunatic asylum. They had made it so much 
their home that the very colour of the country seemed to 
change with the infusion; as the bronze of the great 
statue took on a semblance of the wearing of the green. 
' It is a commonplace that the Englishman has been 
stupid in his relations with the Irish ; but he has been far 
more stupid in his relations with the Americans on the 
subject of the Irish. His propaganda has been worse 
than his practice; and his defence more ill-considered 
than the most indefensible things that it was intended to 
defend. There is in this matter a curious tangle of 
cross-purposes, which only a parallel example can make 
at all clear. And I will note the point here, because it 
is some testimony to its vivid importance that it was 
really the first I had to discuss on American soil with an 
American citizen. In a double sense I touched Ireland 
before I came to America. I will take an imaginary in- 
stance from another controversy; in order to show how 
the apology can be worse than the action. The best we 
can say for ourselves is worse than the worst that we 
can do. 

There was a time when English poets and other 
.publicists could always be inspired with instantaneous 
indignation about the persecuted Jews in Russia. We 
have heard less about them since we heard more about 
the persecuting Jews in Russia. I fear there are a great 



IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 49 

many middle-class Englishmen already who wish that 
Trotsky had been persecuted a little more. But even 
in those days Englishmen divided their minds in a 
curious fashion; and unconsciously distinguished be- 
tween the Jews whom they had never seen, in Warsaw, 
and the Jew whom they had often seen in Whitechapel. 
It seemed to be assumed that, by a curious coincidence, 
Russia possessed not only the very worst Anti-Semites 
but the very best Semites. A moneylender in London 
might be like Judas Iscariot ; but a moneylender in Mos- 
cow must be like Judas Maccabaeus. 

Nevertheless there remained in our common sense an 
unconscious but fundamental comprehension of the unity 
of Israel; a sense that some things could be said, and 
some could not be said, about the Jews as a whole. Sup- 
pose that even in those days, to say nothing of these, an 
English protest against Russian Anti-Semitism had been 
answered by the Russian Anti-Semites, and suppose the 
answer had been somewhat as follows : — 

*It is all very well for foreigners to complain of our 
denying civic rights to our Jewish subjects; but we know 
the Jews better than they do. They are a barbarous 
people, entirely primitive, and very like the simple 
savages who cannot count beyond five on their fingers. 
It is quite impossible to make them understand ordinary 
numbers, to say nothing of simple economics. They do 
not realise the meaning or the value of money. No Jew 
anywhere in the world can get into his stupid head the 
notion of a bargain, or of exchanging one thing for 
another. Their hopeless incapacity for commerce or 
finance would retard the progress of our people, would 
prevent the spread of any sort of economic education, 
would keep the whole country on a level lower than 



50 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

that of the most prehistoric methods of barter. What 
Russia needs most is a mercantile middle class; and it is 
unjust to ask us to swamp its small beginnings in 
thousands of these rude tribesmen, who cannot do a sum 
of simple addition, or understand the symbolic character 
of a threepenny bit. We might as well be asked to give 
civic rights to cows and pigs as to this unhappy half- 
witted race who can no more count than the beasts of 
the field. In every intellectual exercise they are hope- 
lessly incompetent; no Jew can play chess; no Jew can 
learn languages ; no Jew has ever appeared in the smallest 
part in any theatrical performance; no Jew can give or 
take any pleasure connected with any musical instrument. 
These people are our subjects; and we must understand 
them. We accept full responsibility for treating such 
troglodytes on our own terms.' 

It would not be entirely convincing. It would sound 
a little far-fetched and unreal. But it would sound 
exactly like our utterances about the Irish, as they sound 
to all Americans, and rather especially to Anti-Irish 
Americans. That is exactly the impression we produce 
on the people of the United States when we say, as we 
do say in substance, something like this: 'We mean no 
harm to the poor dear Irish, so dreamy, so irresponsible, 
so incapable of order or organisation. If we were to 
withdraw from their country they would only fight 
among themselves; they have no notion of how to rule 
themselves. There is something charming about their 
unpracticability, about their very incapacity for the 
coarse business of politics. But for their own sakes it 
is impossible to leave these emotional visionaries to ruin 
themselves in the attempt to rule themselves. They are 
like children; but they are our own children, and we 



IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS ^i 

understand them. We accept full responsibility for 
acting as their parents and guardians/ 

Now the point is not only that this view of the Irish is 
false, but that it is the particular view that the Americans 
know to be false. While we are saying that the Irish 
could not organise, the Americans are complaining, often 
very bitterly, of the power of Irish organisation. While 
we say that the Irishman could not rule himself, the 
Americans are saying, more or less humorously, that the 
Irishman rules them. A highly intelligent professor 
said to me in Boston, *We have solved the Irish problem 
here; we have an entirely independent Irish Govern- 
ment.' While we are complaining, in an almost passion- 
ate manner, of the impotence of mere cliques of idealists 
and dreamers, they are complaining, often in a very in- 
dignant manner, of the power of great gangs of bosses 
and bullies. There are a great many Americans who 
pity the Irish, very naturally and very rightly, for the 
historic martyrdom which their patriotism has endured. 
[But there are a great many Americans who do not pity 
the Irish in the least. They would be much more likely 
to pity the English; only this particular way of talking 
tends rather to make them despise the English. Thus 
both the friends of Ireland and the foes of Ireland tend 
to be the foes of England. We make one set of enemies 
by our action, and another by our apology. 

It is a thing that can from time to time be found ift 
history; a misunderstanding that really has a moral. 
The English excuse would carry much more weight if 
it had more sincerity and more humility. There are a 
considerable number of people in the United States who 
could sympathise with us, if we would say frankly that 
we fear the Irish. Those who thus despise our pity 



52 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

might possibly even respect our fear. The argument I 
have often used in other places comes back with prodi- 
gious and redoubled force, after hearing anything of 
American opinion ; the argument that the only reasonable 
or reputable excuse for the English is the excuse of a pa- 
triotic sense of peril; and that the Unionist, if he must be 
a Unionist, should use that and no other. When the 
Unionist has said that he dare not let loose against him- 
self a captive he has so cruelly wronged, he has said all 
that he has to say ; all that he has ever had to say ; all that 
he will ever have to say. He is like a man who has sent 
a virile and rather vindictive rival unjustly to penal 
servitude; and who connives at the continuance of the 
sentence, not because he himself is particularly vindic- 
tive, but because he is afraid of what the convict will do 
when he comes out of prison. This is not exactly a 
moral strength, but it is a very human weakness; and 
that is the most that can be said for it. All other talk, 
about Celtic frenzy or Catholic superstition, is cant in- 
vented to deceive himself or to deceive the world. But 
the vital point to realise is that it is cant that cannot pos- 
sibly deceive the American world. In the matter of the 
Irishman the American is not to be deceived. It is not 
merely true to say that he knows better. It is equally 
true to say that he knows worse. He knows vices and 
evils in the Irishman that are entirely hidden in the hazy 
vision of the Englishman. He knows that our unreal 
slanders are inconsistent even with the real sins. To us 
Ireland is a shadowy Isle of Sunset, like Atlantis, about 
which we can make up legends. To him it is a positive 
ward or parish in the heart of his huge cities, like White- 
chapel; about which even we cannot make legends but 
only lies. And, as I have said, there are some lies we do 



IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 53 

not tell even about Whitechapel. We do not say it is in- 
habited by Jews too stupid to count or know the value of 
a coin. 

The first thing for any honest Englishman to send 
across the sea is this; that the English have not the 
shadow of a notion of what they are up against in Amer- 
ica. They have never even heard of the batteries of 
almost brutal energy, of which I had thus touched a live 
wire even before I landed. People talk about the hypoc- 
risy of England in dealing with a small nationality. 
What strikes me is the stupidity of England in supposing 
that she is dealing with a small nationality; when she is 
really dealing with a very large nationality. She is deal- 
ing with a nationality that often threatens, even numeri- 
cally, to dominate all the other nationalities of the United 
States. The Irish are not decaying; they are not un- 
practical; they are scarcely even scattered; they are not 
even poor. They are the most powerful and practical 
world-combination with whom we can decide to be 
friends or foes; and that is why I thought first of that 
still and solid brown house in Buckinghamshire, standing 
back in the shadow of the trees. 

Among my impressions of America I have deliberately 
put first the figure of the Irish-American interviewer, 
standing on the shore more symbolic than the statue of 
Liberty. The Irish interviewer's importance for the 
English lay in the fact of his being an Irishman, but 
there was also considerable interest in the circumstance 
of his being an interviewer. And as certain wild birds 
sometimes wing their way far out to sea and are the first 
signal of the shore, so the first Americans the traveller 
meets are often American interviewers ; and they are gen- 
erally birds of a feather, and they certainly flock together. 



54 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

In this respect, there is a slight difference in the etiquette 
of the craft in the two countries, which I was dehghted 
to discuss with my fellow craftsmen. If I could at that 
moment have flown back to Fleet Street I am happy to 
reflect that nobody in the world would in the least wish to 
interview me. I should attract no more attention than 
the stone griflin opposite the Law Courts ; both monsters 
■being grotesque but also familiar. But supposing for 
the sake of argument that anybody did want to interview 
me, it is fairly certain that the fact of one paper publish- 
ing such an interview would rather prevent the other 
papers from doing so. The repetition of the same views 
of the same individual in two places would be considered 
rather bad journalism; it would have an air of stolen 
thunder, not to say stage thunder. 

But in America the fact of my landing and lecturing 
was evidently regarded in the same light as a murder or 
a great fire, or any other terrible but incurable catastro- 
phe, a matter of interest to all pressmen concerned with 
practical events. One of the first questions I was asked 
was how I should be disposed to explain the wave 
of crime in New York. Naturally I replied that it might 
possibly be due to the number of English lecturers who 
had recently landed. In the mood of the moment It 
seemed possible that, if they had all been interviewed, 
regrettable incidents might possibly have taken place. 
But this was only the mood of the moment, and even as 
a mood did not last more than a moment. And since it 
has reference to a rather common and a rather unjust 
conception of American journalism, I think it well to 
take it first as a fallacy to be refuted, though the refuta- 
tion may require a rather long approach. 



IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 55 

I have generally found that the traveller fails to under- 
stand a foreign country, through treating it as a tendency 
and not as a balance. But if a thing were always tend- 
ing in one direction it would soon tend to destruction. 
'Everything that merely progresses finally perishes. 
Every nation, like every family, exists upon a compro- 
mise, and commonly a rather eccentric compromise; 
using the word 'eccentric' in the sense of something that 
is somehow at once crazy and healthy. Now the for- 
eigner commonly sees some feature that he thinks fantas- 
tic without seeing the feature that balances it. The ordi- 
nary examples are obvious enough. An Englishman 
dining inside an hotel on the boulevards thinks the 
French eccentric in refusing to open a window. But he 
does not think the English eccentric in refusing to carry 
'their chairs and tables out on to the pavement in Ludgate 
Circus. An Englishman will go poking about in little 
Swiss or Italian villages, in wild mountains or in remote 
islands, demanding tea; and never reflects that he is like 
a Chinaman who should enter all the wayside public- 
houses in Kent or Sussex and demand opium. But the 
point is not merely that he demands what he cannot ex- 
pect to enjoy; it is that he ignores even what he does en- 
joy. He does not realise the sublime and starry paradox 
of the phrase, vin ordinaire, which to him should be a 
glorious jest like the phrase 'common gold' or 'daily dia- 
monds.' These are the simple and self-evident cases; 
but there are many more subtle cases of the same thing; 
of the tendency to see that the nation fills up its own gap 
with its own substitute ; or corrects its own extravagance 
with its own precaution. The national antidote gener- 
ally grows wild in the woods side by side with the na- 



56 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

tional poison. If it did not, all the natives would be 
dead. For it is so, as I have said, that nations necessarily 
die of the undiluted poison called progress. 

It is so in this much-abused and over-abused example 
of the American journalist. The American interviewers 
really have exceedingly good manners for the purposes 
of their trade, granted that it is necessary to pursue their 
trade. And even what is called their hustling method 
can truly be said to cut both ways, or hustle both ways ; 
for if they hustle in, they also hustle out. It may not at 
first sight seem the very warmest compliment to a gentle- 
man to congratulate him on the fact that he soon goes 
away. But it really is a tribute to his perfection in a 
very delicate social art; and I am quite serious when I 
say that in this respect the interviewers are artists. It 
might be more difficult for an Englishman to come to 
the point, particularly the sort of point which American 
journalists are supposed, with some exaggeration, to aim 
at. It might be more difficult for an Englishman to ask 
a total stranger on the spur of the moment for the exact 
inscription on his mother's grave; but I really think that 
if an Englishman once got so far as that he would go 
very much farther, and certainly go on very much 
longer. The Englishman would approach the church- 
yard by a rather more wandering woodland path; but if 
once he had got to the grave I think he would have much 
more disposition, so to speak, to sit down on it. Our 
own national temperament would find it decidedly more 
difficult to disconnect when connections had really been 
established. Possibly that is the reason why our na- 
tional temperament does not establish them. I suspect 
that the real reason that an Englishman does not talk is 
that he cannot leave off talking. I suspect that my soli- 



IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 57 

tary countrymen, hiding in separate railway compart- 
ments, are not so much retiring as a race of Trappists 
as escaping from a face o£ talkers. 

However this may be, there is obviously something 
of practical advantage in the ease with which the Ameri- 
can butterfly flits from flower to flower. He may in a 
sense force his acquaintance on us, but he does not force 
himself on us. Even when, to our prejudices, he seems 
to insist on knowing us, at least he does not insist on our 
knowing him. It may be, to some sensibilities, a bad 
thing that a total stranger should talk as if he were a 
friend, but it might possibly be worse if he insisted on 
being a friend before he would talk like one. To a great 
deal of the interviewing', indeed much the greater part of 
it, even this criticism does not apply; there is nothing 
which even an Englishman of extreme sensibility could 
regard as particularly private ; the questions involved are 
generally entirely public, and treated with not a little 
public spirit. But my only reason for saying here what 
can be said even for the worst exceptions is to point out 
this general and neglected principle; that the very thing 
that we complain of in a foreigner generally carries with 
it its own foreign ciire. American interviewing is gen- 
erally very reasonable, and it is always very rapid. And 
even those to whom talking to an intelligent fellow crea- 
ture is as horrible as having a tooth out may still admit 
that American interviewing has many of the qualities of 
American dentistry. 

Another effect that has given rise to this fallacy, this 
exaggeration of the vulgarity and curiosity of the press, 
is the distinction between the articles and the headlines ; 
or rather the tendency to ignore that distinction. The 
few really imtrue and tmscrupulous things I have seen in 



58 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

American 'stories' have always been in the headlines. 
And the headlines are written by somebody else; some 
solitary and savage cynic locked up in the office, hating 
all mankind, and raging and revenging himself at ran- 
dom, while the neat, polite, and rational pressman can 
safely be let loose to wander about the town. 

For instance, I talked to two decidedly thoughtful 
fellow journalists immediately on my arrival at a town 
in which there had been some labour troubles. I told 
them my general view of Labour in the very largest and 
perhaps the vaguest historical outline; pointing out that 
the one great truth to be taught to the middle classes was 
that Capitalism was itself a crisis, and a passing crisis; 
that it was not so much that it was breaking down as that 
it had never really stood up. Slaveries could last, and 
peasantries could last; but wage-earning communities 
could hardly even live, and were already dying. 

All this moral and even metaphysical generalisation 
was most fairly and most faithfully reproduced by the in- 
terviewer, who had actually heard it casually and idly 
spoken. But on the top of this column of political phil- 
osophy was the extraordinary announcement in enor- 
mous letters, 'Chesterton Takes Sides in Trolley Strike.' 
This was inaccurate. When I spoke I not only did not 
know that there was any trolley strike, but I did not know 
what a trolley strike was. I should have had an indistinct 
idea that a large number of citizens earned their living 
'by carrying things about in wheel-barrows, and that they 
had desisted from the beneficent activities. Any one 
who did not happen to be a journalist, or know a little 
about journalism, American and English, would have 
supposed that the same man who wrote the article had 
suddenly gone mad and written the title. But I know 



IRISH. AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 59 

that we have here to deal with two different types of 
journalists ; and the man who writes the headlines I will 
not dare to describe; for I have not seen him except in 
dreams. 

Another innocent complication is that the interviewer 
does sometimes translate things into his native language. 
It would not seem odd that a French interviewer should 
translate them into French; and it is certain that the 
American interviewer sometimes translates them into 
American. Those who imagine the two languages to be 
the same are more innocent than any interviewer. To 
take one out of the twenty examples, some of which I 
have mentioned elsewhere, suppose an interviewer had 
said that I had the reputation of being a nut. I should 
be flattered but faintly surprised at such a tribute to my 
dress and dashing exterior. I should afterwards be so- 
bered and enlightened by discovering that in America 
a nut does not mean a dandy but a defective or imbecile 
person. And as I have here to translate their American 
phrase into English, it may be very defensible that they 
should translate my English phrases into American. 
Anyhow they often do translate them into American. 
In answer to the usual question about Prohibition I 
had made the usual answer, obvious to the point of dull- 
ness to those who are in daily contact with it, that it is 
a law that the rich make knowing they can always break 
it. From the printed interview it appeared that I had 
said, Trohibition! All matter of dollar sign.' This 
is almost avowed translation, like a French translation. 
Nobody can suppose that it would come natural to an 
Englishman to talk about a dollar, still less about a dollar 
sign — whatever that may be. It is exactly as if he had 
made me talk about the Skelt and Stevenson Toy Theatre 



6o WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

as 'a cent plain, and two cents coloured' or condemned 
a parsimonious policy as dim;e-wise and dollar- foolish. 
Another interviewer once asked me who was the greatest 
American writer. I have forgotten exactly what I said, 
but after mentioning several names, I said that the 
greatest natural genius and artistic force was probably 
Walt Whitman. The printed interview is more precise; 
and students of my literary and conversational style 
will be interested to know that I said, 'See here, Walt 
Whitman was your one real red-blooded man.' Here 
again I hardly think the translation can have been quite 
unconscious; most of my intimates are indeed aware 
that I do not talk like that, but I fancy that the sam*e 
fact would have dawned on the journalist to whom I 
had been talking. And even this trivial point carries 
with it the two truths which must be, I fear, the rather 
monotonous moral of these pages. The first is that 
America and England can be far better friends when 
sharply divided than when shapelessly amalgamated. 
These two journalists were false reporters, but they 
were true translators. They were not so much inter- 
viewers as interpreters. And the second is that in any 
such difference it is often wholesome to look beneath 
the surface for a superiority. For ability to translate 
does imply ability to understand; and many of these 
journalists really did understand. I think there are many 
English journalists who would be more puzzled by so 
simple an idea as the plutocratic foundation of Prohibi- 
tion. But the American knew at once that I meant it 
was a matter of dollar sign; probably because he knew 
very well that it is. 

Then again there is a curious convention by which 
American interviewing makes itself out much worse than 



IRISH AND OTHER INTERVIEWERS 6i 

it is. The reports are far more rowdy and insolent than 
the conversations. This is probably a part of the fact 
that a certain vivacity, which to some seems vitality and 
to some vulgarity, is not only an ambition but an ideal. 
It must always be grasped that this vulgarity is an ideal 
even more than it is a reality. It is an ideal when it 
is not a reality. A very quiet and intelligent young 
man, in a soft black hat and tortoise-shell spectacles, 
will ask for an interview with unimpeachable politeness, 
wait for his living subject with unimpeachable patience, 
talk to him quite sensibly for twenty minutes, and go 
noiselessly away. Then in the newspaper next morning 
you will read how he beat the bedroom door in, and 
pursued his victim on to the roof or dragged him from 
under the bed, and tore front him replies to all sorts of 
bald and ruthless questions printed in large black letters. 
I was often interviewed in the evening, and had no notion 
of how atrociously I had been insulted till I saw it in the 
paper next morning. I had no notion I had been on the 
rack of an inquisitor until I saw it in plain print; and 
then of course I believed it, with a faith and docility 
unknown in any previous epoch of history. An inter- 
esting essay might be written upon points upon which 
nations affect more vices than they possess ; and it might 
deal more fully with the American pressman, who is a 
harmless clubman in private, and becomes a sort of high- 
way-robber in print. 

I have turned this chapter into something like a defence 
of interviewers, because I really think they are made to 
'bear too much of the burden of the bad developments of 
modern journalism. But I am very far from meaning 
to suggest that those bad developments are not very bad. 
So far from wishing to minimise the evil, I would in 



62 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

a real sense rather magnify it. I would suggest that 
the evil itself is a much larger and more fundamental 
thing; and that to deal with it by abusing poor journalists, 
doing their particular and perhaps peculiar duty, is like 
dealing with a pestilence by rubbing at one of the spots. 
What is wrong with the modern world will not be righted 
by attributing the whole disease to each of its symptoms 
in turn; first to the tavern and then to the cinema and 
then to the reporter's room. The evil of journalism is 
not in the journalists. It is not in the poor men on the 
lowest level of the profession, but in the rich men at 
the top of the profession ; or rather in the rich men who 
are too much on top of the profession even to belong to 
it. The trouble with newspapers is the Newspaper Trust, 
as the trouble might be with a Wheat Trust, without 
involving a vilification of all tne people who grow wheat. 
It is the American plutocracy and not the American press. 
What is the matter with the modern world is not modern 
headlines or modern films or modern machinery. What 
is the matter with the modern world is the modern world ; 
and the cure will come from another. 



SOME AMERICAN CITIES 

THERE is one point, almost to be called a para- 
dox, to be noted about New York; and that is 
that in one sense it is really new. The term 
very seldom has any relevance to the reality. The New 
Forest is nearly as old as the Conquest, and the New 
Theology is nearly as old as the Creed. Things have 
been offered to me as the new thought that might more 
properly be called the old thoughtlessness ; and the thing 
we call the New Poor Law is already old enough to 
know better. But there is a sense in which New York 
is always new; in the sense that it is always being re- 
newed. A stranger might well say that the chief in- 
dustry of the citizens consists of destroying their city; 
but he soon realises that they always start it all over 
again with undiminished energy and hope. At first I 
had a fancy that they never quite finished putting up 
a big building without feeling that it was time to pull it 
down again ; and that somebody began to dig up the first 
foundations while somebody else was putting on the last 
tiles. This fills the whole of this brilliant and bewilder- 
ing place with a quite unique and unparalleled air of rapid 
ruin. Ruins spring up so suddenly like mushrooms, 
which with us are the growth of age like mosses, that one 
half expects to see ivy climbing quickly up the broken 
walls as in the nightmare of the Time Machine, or in 
some incredibly accelerated cinema. 

There is no sight in any country that raises my own 
spirits so much as a scaffolding. It is a tragedy that 

63 



64 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

they always take the scaffolding away, and leave us 
nothing but a mere building. If they would only take 
the building away and leave us a beautiful scaffolding, it 
would in most cases be a gain to the loveliness of earth. 
If I could analyse what it is that Hfts the heart about 
the lightness and clarity of such a white and wooden 
skeleton, I could explain what it is that is really charm- 
ing about New York; in spite df its suffering from the 
curse of cosmopolitanism and even the provincial super- 
stition of progress. It is partly that all this destruction 
and reconstruction is an unexhausted artistic energy; but 
it is partly also that it is an artistic energy that does 
not take itself too seriously. It is first because man is 
here a carpenter; and secondly because he is a stage car- 
penter. Indeed there is about the whole scene the spirit 
of scene-shifting. It therefore touches whatever nerve 
in us has since childhood thrilled at all theatrical things. 
But the picture will be imperfect unless we realise some- 
thing which gives it unity and marks its chief difference 
from the climate and colours of Western Europe. We 
may say that the back-scene remains the same. The 
sky remained, and in the depths of winter it seemed to be 
blue with summer; and so clear that I almost flattered 
mysdf that clouds were English products like primroses. 
An American would probably retort on my charge of 
scene-shifting by saying that at least he only shifted the 
towers and domes of the earth; and that in England it is 
the heavens that are shifty. And indeed we have 
changes from day to day that would seem to him as 
distinct as different magic-lantern slides; one view 
showing the Bay of Naples and the next the North Pole. 
I do not mean, of course, that there are no changes in 
American weather; but as a matter of proportion it is 



SOME AMERICAN CITIES 65 

true that the most unstable part of our scenery is the 
most stable part of theirs. Indeed we might almost be 
pardoned the boast that Britain alone really possesses the 
noble thing called weather; most other countries having 
to be content with climate. It must be confessed, how- 
ever, that they often are content with it. And the beauty 
of New York, which is considerable, is very largely due 
to the clarity that brings out the colours of varied build- 
ings against the equal colour of the sky. Strangely 
enough I found myself repeating about this vista of the 
.West two vivid lines in which Mr. W. B. Yeats has called 
up a vision of the East: — 

And coloured like the eastern birds 
At evening in their rainless skies. 

To invoke a somewhat less poetic parallel, even the 
untravelled Englishman has probably seen American 
posters and trade advertisements of a patchy and gaudy 
kind, in which a white house or a yellow motor-car are 
cut out as in a cardboard against a sky like blue marble. 
I used to think it was only New Art, but I found that it 
is really New York. 

It is not for nothing that the very nature of local 
character has gained the nickname of local colour. 
Colour runs through all our experience ; -and we all know 
that our childhood found talismanic gems in the very 
paints in the paint-box, or even in their very names. 
And just as the very name of 'crimson lake' really sug- 
gested to me some sanguine and mysterious mere, dark 
yet red as blood, so the very name of 'burnt sienna' 
became afterwards tangled up in my mind with the 
notion of something traditional and tragic; as if some 
such golden Italian city had really been darkened by 



66 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

many conflagrations in the wars of mediaeval de- 
mocracy. Now if one had the caprice of conceiving some 
city exactly contrary to one thus seared and seasoned by 
fire, its colour might be called up to a childish fancy by 
the mere name of 'raw umber' ; and such a city is New 
York. I used to be puzzled by the name of 'raw umber,' 
being unable to imagine the effect of fried umber or 
stewed umber. But the colours of New York are exactly 
in that key; and might be adumbrated by phrases like 
raw pink or raw yellow. It is really in a sense like 
something uncooked; or something which the satiric 
would call half-baked. And yet the effect is not only 
beautiful, it is even delicate. I had no name for this 
nuance; until I saw that somebody had written of 'the 
pastel-tinted towers of New York' ; and I knew that the 
name had been found. There are no paints dry enough 
to describe all that dry light ; and it is not a box of 
colours but of crayons. If the Englishman returning to 
England is moved at the sight of a block of white chalk, 
the American sees rather a bundle of chalks. Nor can I 
imagine anything more moving. Fairy tales are told to 
children about a country where the trees are like sugar- 
sticke and the lakes like treacle, but most children would 
feel almost as greedy for a fairyland where the trees 
were like brushes of green paint and the hills were of 
coloured chalks. 

But here what accentuates the arid freshness is the 
fragmentary look of the continual reconstruction and 
change. The strong daylight finds everywhere the 
broken edges of things, and the sort of hues we see in 
newly-turned earth or the white sections of trees. And 
it is in this respect that the local colour can literally be 
taken as local character. For New York considered in 



SOME AMERICAN CITIES dy 

itself is primarily a place of unrest, and those who sin- 
cerely love it, as many do, love it for the romance of its 
restlessness. A man almost looks at a building as he 
passes to wonder whether it will be there when he comes 
back from his walk; and the doubt is part of an inde- 
scribable notion, as of a white nightmare of daylight, 
which is increased by the very numbering of the streets, 
with its tangle of numerals which at first makes an Eng- 
lish head reel. The detail is merely a symbol; and 
when he is used to it he can see that it is, like the most 
humdrum human customs, both worse and better than 
his own. '271 West 52nd Street* is the easiest of all 
addresses to find, but the hardest of all addresses to 
remember. He who is, like myself, so constituted as 
necessarily to lose any piece of paper he has particular 
reason to preserve, will find himself wishing the place 
were called Tine Crest' or 'Heather Crag' like any unob- 
trusive villa in Streatham. But his sense of some sort 
of incalculable calculations, as of the vision of a mad 
mathematician, is rooted in a more real impression. His 
first feeling that his head is turning round is due to 
something really dizzy in the movement of a life that 
turns dizzily like a wheel. If there be in the modern 
mind something paradoxical that can find peace in 
change, it is here that it has indeed built its habitation or 
rather is still building and unbuilding it. One might 
fancy that it changes in everything and that nothing en- 
dures but its invisible name; and even its name, as I 
have said, seems to make a boast of novelty. 

That is something like a sincere first impression of the 
atmosphere of New York. Those who think that is the 
atmosphere of America have never got any farther than 
New York. We might almost say that they have never 



68 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

entered America, any more than if they had been de- 
tained Hke undesirable aHens at ElHs Island. And in- 
deed there are a good many undesirable aliens detained 
on Manhattan Island too. But of that I will not speak, 
being myself an alien with no particular pretentions to 
be desirable. Anyhow, such is New York; but such is 
not the New World. The great American Republic 
contains very considerable varieties, and of these varie- 
ties, I necessarily saw far too little to allow me to gen- 
eralise. But from the little I did see, I should venture 
on the generalisation that the great part of America is 
singularly and even strikingly unlike New York. It 
goes without saying that New York is very unlike the 
vast agricultural plains and small agricultural towns of 
the Middle West, which I did see. It may be conject- 
ured with some confidence that it is very unlike what is 
called the Wild and sometimes the Woolly West, which 
I did not see. But I am here comparing New York, not 
with the newer states of the prairie or the mountains, 
but with the other older cities of the Atlantic coast. 
And New York, as it seems to me, is quite vitally differ- 
ent from the other historic cities of America. It is so 
different that it shows them all for the moment in a false 
light, as a long white searchlight will throw a light that 
is fantastic and theatrical upon ancient and quiet villages 
folded in the everlasting hills. Philadelphia and Boston 
and Baltimore are more like those quiet villages than they 
are like New York. 

If I were to call this book *The Antiquities of 
America,' I should give rise to misunderstanding and 
possibly to annoyance. And yet the double sense in 
such words is an undeserved misfortune for them. We 
talk of Plato or the Parthenon or the Greek passion for 



SOME AMERICAN CITIES 69 

beauty as parts of the antique, but hardly of the anti- 
quated. When we call them ancient it is not because 
they have perished, but rather because they have sur- 
vived. In the same way I hear some New Yorkers refer 
to Philadelphia or Baltimore as 'dead towns/ They 
mean by a dead town a town that has had the impudence 
not to die. Such people are astonished to find an ancient 
thing alive, just as they are now astonished, and will be 
increasingly astonished, to find Poland or the Papacy or 
the French nation still alive. And what I mean by Phil- 
adelphia and Baltimore being alive is precisely what 
these people mean by their being dead; it is continuity; it 
is the presence of the life first breathed into them and of 
the purpose of their being; it is the benediction of the 
founders of the colonies and the fathers of the republic. 
This tradition is truly to be called life; for life alone can 
link the past and the future. It merely means that as 
what was done yesterday makes some difference to-day, 
so what is done to-day will make some difference to- 
morrow. In New York it is difificult to feel that any day 
will make any difiference. These moderns only die daily 
without power to rise from the dead. But I can truly 
claim that in coming into some of these more stable cities 
of the States I felt something quite sincerely of that his- 
toric emotion which ia satisfied in the eternal cities of the 
Mediterranean. I felt in America what many Ameri- 
cans suppose can only be felt in Europe. I have seldom 
had that sentiment stirred more simply and directly than 
when I saw from afar off, above that vast grey labyrinth 
of Philadelphia, great Penn upon his pinnacle like the 
graven figure of a god who had fashioned a new world ; 
and remembered that his body lay buried in a field at the 
turning of a 'lane, a league from my own door. 



yo WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

For this aspect of America is rather neglected in the 
talk about electricity and headlines. Needless to say, the 
modern vulgarity of avarice and advertisement sprawls 
all over Philadelphia or Boston ; but so it does over Win- 
chester or Canterbury. But most people know that there 
is something else to be found in Canterbury or Winches- 
ter; many people know that it is rather more interesting; 
and some people know that Alfred can still walk in Win- 
chester and that St. Thomas at Canterbury was killed 
but did not die. It is at least as possible for a Philadel- 
phian to feel the presence of Penn and Franklin as for an 
Englishman to see the ghosts of Alfred and of Becket. 
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean 
that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It 
means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred 
years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I 
never could feel in New York that it mattered what any- 
body did an hour ago. And these things did and do mat- 
ter. Quakerism is not my favourite creed; but on that 
day when William Penn stood unarmed upon that spot 
and made his treaty with the Red Indians, his creed of 
humanity did have a triumph and a triumph that has not 
turned back. The praise given to him is not a priggish 
fiction of our conventional history, though such fictions 
have illogically curtailed it. The Nonconformists have 
been rather unfair to Penn even in picking their praises ; 
and they generally forget that toleration cuts both ways 
and that an open mind is open on all sides. Those who 
deify him for consenting to bargain with the savages 
cannot forgive him for consenting to bargain with the 
Stuarts. And the same is true of the other city, yet 
more closely connected with the tolerant experiment of 
the Stuarts. The state of Maryland was the first ex- 



SOME AMERICAN CITIES 71 

periment in religious freedom in human history. Lord 
Bahimore and his Catholics were a long march ahead 
of William Penn and his Quakers on what is now called 
the path of progress. That the first religious toleration 
ever granted in the world was granted by Roman Cath- 
olics is one of those little informing details with which 
our Victorian histories did not exactly teem. But when 
I went into my hotel at Baltimore and found two priests 
waiting to see me, I was moved in a new fashion, for 
I felt that I touched the end of a living chain. Nor 
was the impression accidental ; it will always remain with 
me with a mixture of gratitude and grief, for they 
brought a message of welcome from a great American 
whose name I had known from childhood and whose 
career was drawing to its close; for it was but a few 
days after I left the city that I learned that Cardinal Gib- 
bons was dead. 

On the top of a hill on one side of the town stood 
the first monument raised after the Revolution to 
Washington. Beyond it was a new monument saluting 
in the name of Lafayette the American soldiers who 
fell fighting in France in the Great War. Between 
them were steps and stone seats, and I sat down on 
one of them and talked to two children who were 
clambering about the bases of the monument. I felt 
a profound and radiant peace in the thought that they 
at any rate were not going to my lecture. It made 
me happy that in that talk neither they nor I had any 
names. I was full of that indescribable waking vision 
of the strangeness of life, and especially of the strange- 
ness of locality; of how we find places and lose them; 
and see faces for a moment in a far-off land, and it is 
equally mysterious if we remember and mysterious if we 



72 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

forget. I had even stirring in my head the suggestion 
of some verses that I shall never finish — 

If I ever go back to Baltimore 
The city of Maryland. 

But the poem v^ould have to contain far too much; 
for I was thinking of a thousand things at once; and 
wondering what the children would be like twenty 
years after and whether they would travel in white goods 
or be interested in oil, and I was not untouched 
(it may be said) by the fact that a neighbouring shop 
had provided the only sample of the substance called 
'tea' ever found on the American continent; and in 
front of me soared up into the sky on wings of stone 
the column of all those high hopes of humanity a 
hundred years ago; and beyond there were lighted 
candles in the chapels and prayers in the ante-chambers, 
where perhaps already a Prince of the Church was 
dying. Only on a later page can I even attempt to 
comb out such a tangle of contrasts, which is indeed 
the tangle of America and this mortal life; but sitting 
there on that stone seat under that quiet sky, I had 
some experience of the thronging thousands of living 
thoughts and things, noisy and numberless as birds, 
that give its everlasting vivacity and vitality to a dead 
town. 

Two other cities I visited which have this particular 
type of traditional character, the one being typical of 
the North and the other of the South. At least I 
may take as convenient anti-types the towns of Boston 
and St. Louis; and we might add Nashville as being 
a shade more truly southern than St. Louis. To the 
extreme South, in the sense of what is called the Black 



SOME AMERICAN CITIES 73 

Belt, I never went at all. Now English travellers 
expect the South to be somewhat traditional; but they 
are not prepared for the aspects of Boston in the 
North which are even more so. If we wished only for 
an antic of antithesis, we might say that on one side 
the places are more prosaic than the names and on 
the other the names are more prosaic than the places. 
St. Louis is a fine town, and we recognise a fine 
instinct of the imagination that set on the hill over- 
looking the river the statue of that holy horseman 
who has christened the city. But the city is not as 
beautiful as its name; it could not be. Indeed these 
titles set up a standard to which the most splendid 
spires and turrets could not rise, and below which the 
commercial chimneys and sky-signs conspicuously sink. 
We should think it odd if Belfast had borne the name 
of Joan of Arc. We should be slightly shocked if the 
town of Johannesburg happened to be called Jesus Christ. 
But few have noted a blasphemy, or even a somewhat 
challenging benediction, to be found in the very name of 
San Francisco. 

But on the othar hand a place like Boston is much 
more beautiful than its name. And, as I have suggested, 
an Englishman's general information, or lack of infor- 
mation, leaves him in some ignorance of the type of 
beauty that turns up in that type of place. He has heard 
so much about the purely commercial North as against 
the agricultural and aristocratic 'South, and the traditions 
of Boston and Phildelphia are rather too tenuous and 
delicate to be seen from across the Atlantic. But here 
also there are traditions and a great deal of tradi- 
tionalism. The circle of old families, which still meets 
with a certain exclusiveness in Philadelphia, is the sort 



74 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

of thing that we in England should expect to find rather 
in New Orleans. The academic aristocracy of Boston, 
which Oliver Wendell Holmes called the Brahmins, is still 
a reality though it was always a minority and is now a 
very small minority. An epigram, invented by Yale at 
the expense of Harvard, describes it as very small in- 
deed :--^ 

Here is to jolly old Boston, the home of the bean and the 

cod, 
Where Cabots speak only to Lowells, and Lowells speak 

only to God. 

But an aristocracy must be a minority, and it is arguable 
that the smaller it is the better. I am bound to say, 
however, that the distinguished Dr. Cabot, the present 
representative of the family, broke through any taboo 
that may tie his affections to his Creator and to Miss 
Amy Lowell, and broadened his sympathies so indis- 
criminately as to show kindness and hospitality to so 
lost a being as an English lecturer. But if the thing 
is hardly a limit it is very living as a memory; and 
Boston on this side is very much a place of memories. 
It would be paying it a very poor compliment merely 
to say that parts of it reminded me of England; for 
indeed they reminded me of English things that have 
largely vanished from England. There are old brown 
houses in the corners of squares and streets that are 
like glimpses of a man's forgotten childhood; and when 
I saw the log path with posts where the Autocrat may 
be supposed to have walked with the schoolmistress, 
I felt I had come to the land where old tales come true. 
I pause in this place upon this particular aspect of 
America because it is very much missed in a mere con- 



SOME AMERICAN CITIES 75 

trast with England. I need not say that if I felt it 
even about slight figures of fiction, I felt it even more 
about solid figures of history. Such ghosts seemed par- 
ticularly solid in the Southern States, precisely because 
of the comparative quietude and leisure of the atmos- 
phere of the South. It was never more vivid to me 
than when coming, at a quiet hour of the night, into the 
comparatively quiet hotel at Nashville in Tennessee, and 
mounting to a dim and deserted upper floor where I 
found myself before a faded picture ; and from the dark 
canvas looked forth the face of Andrew Jackson, watch- 
ful like a white eagle. 

At that moment, perhaps, I was in more than one 
sense alone. Most Englishmen know a good deal of 
American fiction, and nothing whatever of American 
history. They know more about the autocrat of the 
breakfast-table than about the autocrat of the army and 
the people, the one great democratic despot of modern 
times; the Napoleon of the New World. The only 
notion the English public ever got about American politics 
they got from a novel. Uncle Tom's Cabin; and to say 
the least of it, it was no exception to the prevalence 
of fiction over fact. Hundreds of us have heard of Tom 
Sawyer for one who had heard of Charles Sumner; and 
it is probable that most of us could pass a more detailed 
examination about Toddy and Budge than about Lincoln 
and Lee. But in the case of Andrew Jackson it may be 
that I felt a special sense of individual isolation; for 
I believe that there are even fewer among Englishmen 
than among Americans who realise that the energy of 
that great man was largely directed towards saving us 
from the chief evil which destroys the nations to-day. 
He sought to cut down, as with a sword of simplicity, 



76 - WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

the new and nameless enormity of finance; and he must 
have known, as by a lightning flash, that the people were 
behind him, because all the politicians were against him. 
The end of that struggle is not yet; but if the bank is 
stronger than the sword or the sceptre of popular sov- 
ereignty, the end will be the end of democracy. It will 
have to choose between accepting an acknowledged dic- 
tator and accepting dictation which it dare not acknowl- 
edge. The process will have begun by giving power to 
people and refusing to give them their titles; and it 
will have ended by giving the power to people who refuse 
to give us their names. 

But I have a special reason for ending this chapter 
on the name of the great popular dictator who made 
war on the politicians and the financiers. This chapter 
does not profess to touch on one in twenty of the 
interesting cities of America, even in this particular 
aspect of their relation to the history of America, which 
is so much neglected in England. If that were so, there 
would be a great deal to say even about the newest of 
them ; Chicago, for instance, is certainly something more 
than the mere pork-packing yard that English tradition 
suggests; and it has been building a boulevard not un- 
worthy of its splendid position on its splendid lake. 
But all these cities are defiled and even diseased with in- 
dustrialism. It is due to the Americans to remember that 
they have deliberately preserved one of their cities from 
such defilement and such disease. And that is the pres- 
idential city, which stands in the American mind for 
the same ideal as the President; the idea of the Republic 
that rises above modern money-making and endures. 
There has really been an effort to keep the White House 
white. No factories are allowed in that town; no more 



SOME AMERICAN CITIES ^^ 

than the necessary shops are tolerated. It is a beautiful 
city; and really retains something of that classical 
serenity of the eighteenth century in which the Fathers 
of the Republic moved. With all respect to the colonial 
place of that name, I do not suppose that Wellington 
is particularly like Wellington. But Washington really 
is like Washington. 

In this, as in so many things, there is no harm in our 
criticising foreigners, if only we would also criticise 
ourselves. In other words, the world might need even 
less of its new charity, if it had a little more of the old 
humility. When we complain of American individual- 
ism, we forget that we have fostered it by ourselves 
having far less of this impersonal ideal of the Republic 
or commonwealth as a whole. When we complain, very 
justly, for instance, of great pictures passing into the 
possession of American magnates, we ought to remember 
that we paved the way for it by allowing them all to 
accumulate in the possession of English magnates. It 
is bad that a public treasure should be in the possession 
of a private man in America, but we took the first step in 
lightly letting it disappear into the private collection of 
a man in England. I know all about the genuine na- 
tional tradition which treated the aristocracy as constitut- 
ing the state ; but these very foreign purchases go to prove 
that we ought to have had a state independent of the 
aristocracy. It is true that rich Americans do some- 
times covet the monuments of our culture in a fashion 
that rightly revolts us as vulgar and irrational. They 
are said sometimes to want to take whole buildings away 
with them; and too many of such buildings are private 
and for sale. There were wilder stories of a millionaire 
wishing to transplant Glastonbury Abbey and similar 



78 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

buildings as if they were portable shrubs in pots. It is 
obvious that it is nonsense as well as vandalism to sepa- 
rate Glastonbury Abbey from Glastonbury. I can un- 
derstand a man venerating it as a ruin ; and I can under- 
stand a man despising it as a rubbish-heap. But it is 
senseless to insult a thing in order to idolatrise it; it is 
meaningless to desecrate the shrine in order to worship 
the stones. That sort of thing is the bad side of Ameri- 
can appetite and ambition; and we are perfectly right 
to see it not only as a deliberate blasphemy but as an 
unconscious buffoonery. But there is another side to 
the American tradition, which is really too much lacking 
in our own tradition. And it is illustrated in this idea 
of preserving Washington as a sort of paradise of im- 
personal politics without personal commerce. Nobody 
could buy the White House or the Washington Monu- 
ment; it may be hinted (as by an inhabitant of Glaston- 
bury) that nobody wants to; but nobody could if he did 
want to. There is really a certain air of serenity and 
security about the place, lacking in every other American 
town. It is increased, of course, by the clear blue skies 
of that half -southern province, from which smoke has 
been banished. The effect is not so much in the mere 
buildings, though they are classical and often beautiful. 
But whatever else they have built, they have built a great 
blue dome, the largest dome in the world. And the place 
does express something in the inconsistent idealism of 
this strange people; and here at least they have lifted it 
higher than all the sky-scrapers, and set it in a stainless 
sky. 



IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 

THE sharpest pleasure of a traveller is in finding 
the things which he did not expect, but which he 
might have expected to expect. I mean the 
things that are at once so strange and so obvious that 
they must have been noticed, yet somehow they have not 
been noted. Thus I had heard a thousand things about 
Jerusalem before I ever saw it; I had heard rhapsodies 
and disparagements of every description. Modern ra- 
tionalistic critics, with characteristic consistency, had 
blamed it for its accumulated rubbish and its modern 
restoration, for its antiquated superstition and its up-to- 
date vulgarity. But somehow the one impression that 
had never pierced through their description was the 
simple and single impression of a city on a hill, with' 
walls coming to the very edge of slopes that were almost 
as steep as walls ; the turreted city which crowns a cone- 
shaped hill in so many mediaeval landscapes. One would 
suppose that this was at once the plainest and most pic- 
turesque of all the facts; yet somehow, in my reading, 
I had always lost it amid a mass of minor facts that were 
merely details. We know that a city that is set upon a 
hill cannot be hid ; and yet it would seem that it is exactly 
the hill that is hid ; though perhaps it is only hid from the 
wise and the understanding. I had a similar and simple 
impression when I discovered America. I cannot avoid 
the phrase; for it would really seem that each man dis- 
covers it for himself. 

Thus I had heard a great deal, before I saw them. 

79 



8o WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

about the tall and dominant buildings of New York. 
I agree that they have an instant effect on the imagina- 
tion ; which I think is increased by the situation in which 
they stand, and out of which they arose. They are all 
the more impressive because the building, while it is 
vertically so vast, is horizontally almost narrow. New 
York is an island, and has all the intensive romance 
of an island. It is a thing of almost infinite height 
upon very finite foundations. It is almost like a 
lofty lighthouse upon a lonely rock. But this story 
of the sky-scrapers, which I had often heard, would by 
itself give a curiously false impression of the freshest 
and most curious characteristic of American architec- 
ture. Told only in terms of these great towers of 
stone and brick in the big industrial cities, the story 
would tend too much to an impression of something 
cold and colossal like the monuments of Asia. It would 
suggest a modern Babylon altogether too Babylonian. It 
would imply that a man of the new world was a sort of 
new Pharaoh, who built not so much a pyramid as a 
pagoda of pyramids. It would suggest houses built by 
mammoths out of mountains; the cities reared by 
elephants in their own elephantine school of architec- 
ture. And New York does recall the most famous of all 
sky-scrapers — the tower of Babel. She recalls it none the 
less because there is no doubt about the confusion of 
tongues. But in truth the very reverse i^ true of most of 
the buildings in America. I had no sooner passed out 
into the suburbs of New York on the way to Boston 
than I began to see something else quite contrary and far 
more curious. I saw forests lipon forests of small 
liouses stretching away to the horizon as literal forests 
do; villages and towns and cities. And they were, in 



IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 8i 

another sense, literally like forests. They were all made 
of wood. It was almost as fantastic to an English eye 
as if they had been all made of cardboard. I had long 
outlived the silly old joke that referred to Americans as 
if they all lived in the backwoods. But, in a sense, if 
they do not live in the woods they are not yet out of the 
wood. 

I do not say this in any sense as a censure. As it 
happens, I am particularly fond of wood. Of all the 
superstitions which our fathers took lightly enough to 
love, the most natural seems to me the notion it is lucky 
to touch wood. Some of them affect me the less as 
superstitions, because I feel them as symbols. If 
humanity had really thought Friday unlucky it would 
have talked about bad Friday instead of good Friday. 
And while I feel the thrill of thirteen at a table, I am 
not so sure that it is the most miserable of all human fates 
to fill the places of the Twelve Apostles. But the idea 
that there was something cleansing or wholesome about 
the touching of wood seems to me one of those ideas 
which are truly popular, because they are truly poetic. 
It is probable enough that the conception came originally 
from the healing of the wood of the Cross; but that only 
clinches the divine coincidence. It is like that other 
divine coincidence that the Victim was a carpenter, who 
might almost have made His own cross. Whether we 
take the mystical or the mythical explanation, there is 
obviously a very deep connection between the human 
working in wood and such plain and pathetic mysticism. 
It gives something like a touch of the holy childishness to 
the tale, as if that terrible engine could be a toy. In the 
same fashion a child fancies that mysterious and sinister 
horse, which was the downfall of Troy, as something 



82 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

plain and staring, and perhaps spotted, like his own rock- 
ing-horse in the nursery. 

Ife might be said symbolically that Americans have a 
taste for rocking-horses, as they certainly have a taste 
for rocking-chairs. A flippant critic might suggest that 
they select rocking-chairs so that, even when they are 
sitting down, they need not be sitting still. Something 
of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in 
the matter; but I think the deeper significance of the 
rocking-chair may still be found in the deeper symbolism 
of the rocking-horse. I think there is behind all this 
fresh and facile use of wood a certain spirit that is 
childish in the good sense of the word; something that 
is innocent, and easily pleased. It is not altogether un- 
true, still less is it unamiable, to say that the landscape 
seems to be dotted with dolls' houses. It is the true 
tragedy of every fallen son of Adam that he has grown 
too big to live in a dolls' house. These things seem 
somehow to escape the irony of tim-e by not even chal- 
lenging it ; they are too temporary even to be merely tem- 
poral. These people are not building tombs; they are 
not, as in the fine image of Mrs. Meynell's poem, merely 
building ruins. It is not easy to imagine the ruins of a 
dolls' house; and that is why a dolls' house is an ever- 
lasting habitation. How far it promises a political per- 
manence is a matter for further discussion; I am only 
describing the mood of discovery; in which all these 
cottages built of lath, like the palaces of a pantomime, 
really seemed coloured like the clouds of morning; 
which are both fugitive and eternal. 

There is also in all this an atmosphere that comes in 
another sense from the nufsery. We hear much of 
Americans being educated on English literature; but I 



IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 83 

think few Americans realise how much English children 
have been educated on American literature. It is true, 
and it is inevitable, that they can only be educated on 
rather old-fashioned American literature. Mr. Bernard 
Shaw, in one of his plays, noted truly the limitations of 
the young American millionaire, and especially the stale- 
ness of his English culture; but there is necessarily 
another side to it. If the American talked more of 
Macaulay than of Nietzsche, we should probably talk 
more of Emerson than of Ezra Pound. Whether this 
staleness is necessarily a disadvantage is, of course, a 
different question. But, in any case, it is true that the 
old American books were often the books of our child- 
hood, even in the literal sense of the books of our nurs- 
ery. I know few men in England who have not left 
their boyhood to some extent lost and entangled in the 
forests of Huckleberry Finn. I know few women in 
England, from the most revolutionary Suffragette to the 
most carefully preserved Early Victorian, who will not 
confess to having passed a happy childhood with the 
Little Women of Miss Alcott. Helen's Babies was the 
first and by far the best book in the modern scriptures 
of baby- worship. And about all this old-fashioned 
American literature there was an undefinable savour that 
satisfied, and even pleased, our growing minds. Per- 
haps it was the smell of growing things; but I am far 
from certain that it was not simply the smell of wood. 
Now that all the memory comes back to me, it seems to 
come back heavy in a hundred forms with the fragrance 
and the touch of timber. There was the perpetual ref- 
erence to the wood-pile, the perpetual background of the 
woods. There was something crude and clean about 
everything; something fresh and strange about those 



84 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA :^"' 

far-off houses, to which I could not then have put a name. 
Indeed, many things become clear in this wilderness of 
wood, which could only be expressed in symbol and even 
in fantasy. I will not go so far as to say that it short- 
ened the transition from Log Cabin to White House ; as 
if the White House were itself made of white wood 
(as Oliver Wendell Holmes said), 'that cuts like cheese, 
but lasts like iron for things like these.' But I will say 
that the experience illuminates some other lines by 
Holmes himself: — 

Little I ask, my wants are few, 
I only ask a hut of stone. 

I should not have known, in England, that he was al- 
ready asking for a good deal even in asking for that. In 
the presence of this wooden world the very combination 
of words seems almost a contradiction, like a hut of 
marble, or a hovel of gold. 

It was therefore with an almost infa^itile pleasure that 
I looked at all this promising expansion of fresh-cut 
timber and thought of the housing shortage at home. I 
know not by what incongruous movement of the mind 
there swept across me, at the same moment, the thought 
of things ancestral and hoary with the light of ancient 
dawns. The last war brought back body-armour ; the 
next war may bring back bows and arrows. And I 
suddenly had a memory of old wooden houses in Lon- 
don; and a model of Shakespeare's town. 

It is possible indedd that such Elizabethan memories 
may receive a check or a chill when the traveller comes, 
as he sometimes does, to the outskirts of one of these 
strange hamlets of new frame-houses, and is confronted 
with a placard inscribed in enormous letters, *Watch Us 



IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 85 

Grow/ He can always imagine that he sees the timbers 
swelling before his eyes like pumpkins in some super- 
tropical summer. But he may have formed the convic- 
tion that no such proclamation could be found outside 
Shakespeare's town. And indeed there is a serious criti- 
cism here, to any one who knows history ; since the things 
that grow are not always the things that remain; and 
pumpkins of that expansiveness have a tendency to burst. 
I was always told that Am.ericans were harsh, hustling, 
rather rude and perhaps vulgar; but they were very- 
practical and the future belonged to them. I confess I 
felt a fine shade of difference ; I liked the Americans ; I 
thought they were sympathetic, imaginative, and full of 
fine enthusiasms; the one thing I could not always feel 
clear about was their future. I believe they were happier 
in their frame-houses than most people in most houses; 
having democracy, good education, and a hobby of work; 
the one doubt that did float across me was something like, 
Will all this be here at all in two hundred years ?' That 
was the first impression produced by the wooden houses 
that seemed like the waggons of gipsies; it is a serious 
impression, but there is an answer to it. It is an answer 
that opens on the traveller more and more as he 
goes westward, and finds the little towns' dotted about 
the vast central prairies. And the answer is agriculture. 
Wooden houses may or may not last ; but farms will last ; 
and farming will always last. 

The houses may look like gipsy caravans on a heath or 
common ; but they are not on a heath or common. They 
are on the most productive and prosperous land, perhaps, 
in the modern world. The houses might fall down like 
shanties, but the fields would remain ; and whoever tills 
those fields will count for a great deal in the affairs of 



86 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

humanity. They are aheady counting for a great deal, 
and possibly for too much, in the affairs of America. 
The real criticism of the Middle West is concerned with 
two facts, neither of which has been yet adequately ap- 
preciated by the educated class in England. The first is 
that the turn of the world has come, and the turn of the 
agricultural countries with it. That is the meaning of 
the resurrection of Ireland; that is the meaning of 
the practical surrender of the Bolshevist Jews to the Rus- 
sian peasants. The other is that in most places these 
peasant societies carry on what may be called the Catholic 
tradition. The Middle West is perhaps the one consid- 
erable place where they still carry on the Puritan tra- 
dition. But the Puritan tradition was originally a tra- 
dition of the town ; and the second truth about the Middle 
West turns largely on its moral relation to the town. As 
I shall suggest presently, there is much in common be- 
tween this agricultural society of America and the great 
agricultural societies of Europe. It tends, as the agri- 
cultural society nearly always does, to some decent degree 
of democracy. The agricul1;ural society tends to the 
agrarian law. But in Puritan America there is an addi- 
tional problem, which I can hardly explain without a peri- 
phrasis. 

There was a time when the progress of the cities 
seemed to mock the decay of the country. It is more 
and more true, I think, to-day that it is rather the decay 
of the cities that seems to poison the progress and prom- 
ise of the countryside. The cinema boasts of being a 
substitute for the tavern, but I think it a very bad sub- 
stitute. I think so quite apart from the question about 
fermented liquor. Nobody enjoys cinemas more than I, 
but to enjoy them a man has only to look and not even 



IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 87 

to listen, and in a .tavern he has to talk. Occasionally, I 
admit, he has to fight; but he need never move at the 
movies. Thus in the real village inn are the real village 
politics, while in the other are only the remote and unreal 
metropolitan politics. And those central city politics 
are not only cosmopolitan politics but corrupt politics. 
They corrupt everything that they reach, and this is the 
real point about many perplexing questions-. 

For instance, so far as I am concerned, it is the whole 
point about feminism and the factory. It is very 
largely the point about feminism and many other callings, 
apparently more cultured than the factory, such as the 
law court and the political platform. When I see 
women so wildly anxious to tie themselves to all this 
machinery of the modern city my first feeling is not in- 
dignation, but that dark and ominous sort of pity with 
which we should see a crowd rushing to embark in a leak- 
ing ship under a lowering storm. When I see wives and 
mothers going in for business government I not only re- 
gard it as a bad business but as a bankrupt business. It 
seems to me very much as if the peasant women, just be- 
fore the French revolution, had insisted on being made 
duchesses or (as is quite as logical and likely) on being 
made dukes. 

It is as if those ragged women, instead of crying out 
for bread, had cried out for powder and patches. By the 
time they were wearing them they would be the only 
people wearing them. For powder and patches soon 
went out of fashion, but bread does not go out of fashion. 
In the same way, if women desert the family for the fac- 
tory, they may find they have only done it for a deserted 
factory. It would have been very unwise of the lower 
orders to claim all the privileges of the higher orders in 



88 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

the last days of the French monarchy. It would have 
been very laborious to learn the science of heraldry or the 
tables of precedence when all such things were at once 
most complicated and most moribund. It would be tire- 
some to be taught all those tricks just when the whole bag 
of tricks was coming to an end. A French satirist might 
have written a fine apologue about Jacques Bonhomme 
coming up to Paris in his wooden shoes and demanding 
to be made Gold Stick in Waiting in the name of Liberty, 
Equality, and Fraternity ; but I fear the stick in waiting 
would be waiting still. 

One of the first topics on which I heard a conversation 
turning in America was that of a very interesting book 
called Main Street, which involves many of these ques- 
tions of the modern industrial and eternal feminine. It 
is simply the story, or perhaps rather the study than the 
story, of a young married woman in one of the multi- 
tudinous little towns on the great central plains of Amer- 
ica; and of a sort of struggle between her own more rest- 
less culture and the provincial prosperity of her neigh- 
bours. There are a number of true and telling sugges- 
tions in the book, but the one touch which I found tin- 
gling in the memory of many readers was the last sen- 
tence, in which the master of the house, with unshaken 
simplicity, merely asks for the whereabouts of some 
domestic implement; I think it was a screw-driver. It 
seems to me a harmless request, but from the way people 
talked about it one might suppose he had asked for a 
screw-driver to screw down the wife in her coffin. And 
a great many advanced persons would tell us that the 
wooden house in which she lived really was like a wooden 
coffin. But this appears to me to be taking a somewhat 
funereal view of the life of humanity. 



IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 89 

For, after all, on the face of it at any rate, this is 
merely the life of humanity, and even the life which all 
humanitarians have striven to give to humanity. Revo- 
lutionists have treated it not only as the normal but even 
as the ideal. Revolutionary wars have been waged to 
establish this; revolutionary heroes have fought, and 
revolutionary martyrs have died, only to build such 
a wooden house for such a worthy family. Men have 
taken the sword and perished by the sword in order that 
the poor gentleman might have liberty to look for his 
screw-driver. For there is here a fact about America 
that is almost entirely unknown in England. The Eng- 
lish have not in the least realised the real strength of 
America. We i'n England hear a great deal, we hear 
far too much, about the economic energy of industrial 
America, about the money of Mr. Morgan, or the 
machinery of Mr. Edison. We never realise that while 
we in England suffer from the same sort of successes 
in capitalism and clockwork, we have not got what the 
Americans have got; something at least to balance it 
in the way of a free agriculture, a vast field of free farms 
dotted with small freeholders. For the reason I shall 
mention in a moment, they are not perhaps in the fullest 
and finest sense a peasantry. But they are in the prac- 
tical and political sense a pure peasantry, in that their 
comparative equality is a true counterweight to the top- 
pling injustice to the towns. 

And, even in places like that described as Main Street, 
that comparative equality can immediately be felt. The 
men may be provincials, but they are certainly citizens; 
they consult on a common basis. And I repeat that in 
this, after all, they do achieve what many prophets and 
righteous men have died to achieve. This plain village. 



90 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

fairly prosperous, fairly equal, untaxed by tyrants and 
untroubled by wars, is after all the place which reformers 
have regarded as their aim; whenever reformers have 
used their wits sufficiently to have any aim. The march 
to Utopia, the march to the Earthly Paradise, the march 
to the New Jerusalem, has been very largely the march 
to Main Street. And the latest modern sensation is a 
book written to show how wretched it is to live there. 

All this is true, and I think the lady might be more 
contented in her coffin, which is more comfortably fur- 
nished than most of the coffins where her fellow crea- 
tures live. Nevertheless, there is an answer to this, or 
at least a modification of it. There is a case for the 
lady and a case against the gentleman and the screw- 
driver. And when we have noted what it really is we 
have noted the real disadvantage in a situation like that 
of modern America, and especially the Middle West. 
And with that we come back to the truth with which I 
started this speculation; the truth that few have yet 
realised, but of w^hich I, for one, am more and more 
convinced — that industrialism is spreading because it is 
decaying; that only the dust and ashes of its dissolution 
are choking up the growth of natural things everywhere 
and turning the green world grey. 

In this relative agricultural equality the Americans of 
the Middle West are far in advance of the English of 
the twentieth century. It is not their fault if they are 
still some centuries behind the English of the twelfth 
century. But the defect by which they fall short of 
being a true peasantry is that they do not produce their 
town spiritual food, in the same sense as their own 
material food. They do not, like some peasantries, create 
other kinds of culture besides the kind called agriculture. 



IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 91 

Their culture comes from the great cities; and that is 
where all the evil comes from. 

If a man had gone across England in the Middle Ages, 
or even across Europe in more recent times, he would 
have found a culture which showed its vitality by its 
variety. We know the adventures of the three brothers 
in the old fairy tales who passed across the endless plain 
from city to city, and found one kingdom ruled by a 
wizard and another wasted by a dragon, one people liv- 
ing in castles of crystal and another sitting by fountains 
of wine. These are but legendary enlargements of the 
real adventures of a traveller passing from one patch of 
peasantry to another and finding women wearing strange 
head-dresses and men singing new songs. 

A traveller in America would be somewhat surprised if 
he found the people in the city of St. Louis all wearing 
crowns and crusading armour in honour of their patron 
saint. He might even feel some faint surprise if he 
found all the citizens of Philadelphia clad in a composite 
costume, combining that of a Quaker with that of a Red 
Indian, in honour of the noble treaty of William P'enn. 
Yet these are the sort of local and traditional things that 
would really be found giving variety to the valleys of 
mediaeval Europe. I myself felt a perfectly genuine 
and generous exhilaration of freedom and fresh enter- 
prise in new places like Oklahoma. But you would 
hardly find in Oklahoma what was found in Oberam- 
mergau. What goes to Oklahoma is not the peasant 
play, but the cinema. And the objection to the cinema 
is not so much that it goes to Oklahoma as that it does 
not come from Oklahoma. In other words, these people 
have on the economic side a much closer approach than 
we have to economic freedom. It is not for us, who 



92 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

have allowed our land to be stolen by squires and then 
vulgarized by sham squires, to sneer at such colonists as 
merely crude and prosaic. They at least have really 
kept something of the simplicity and, therefore, the dig- 
nity of democracy; and that democracy may yet save 
their country even from the calamities of wealth and 
science. 

But, while these farmers do not need to become in- 
dustrial in order to become industrious, they do tend to 
become industrial in so far as they become intellectual. 
Their culture, and to some great extent their creed, do 
come along the railroads from the great modern urban 
centres, and bring with them a blast of death and a reek 
of rotting things. It is that influence that alone pre- 
vents the Middle West from progressing towards the 
Middle Ages. 

For, after all, linked up in a hundred legends of the 
Middle Ages, may be found a symbolic pattern of ham- 
mers and nails and saws; and there is no reason why 
they should not have also sanctified screw-drivers. 
There is no reason why the screw-driver that seemed 
such a trifle to the author should not have been borne in 
triumph down Main Street like a sword of state, in some 
pageant of the Guild of St. Joseph of the Carpenters or 
St. Dunstan of the Smiths. It was the Catholic poetry 
and piety that filled common life with something that is 
lacking in the worthy and virile democracy of the West. 
Nor are Americans of intelligence so ignorant of this as 
some may suppose. There is an admirable society called 
the Mediaevalists in Chicago; whose name and address 
will strike many as suggesting a certain struggle of the 
soul against the environment. With the national hearti- 
ness they blazon their note-paper with heraldry and the 



IN THE AMERICAN COUNTRY 93 

hues of Gothic windows; with the national high spirits 
they assume the fancy dress of friars; but any one who 
should essay to laugh at them instead of with them would 
find out his mistake. For many of them do really know 
a great deal about mediaevalism ; much more than I do, 
or most other men brought up on an island that is 
crowded with its cathedrals. Something of the same 
spirit may be seen in the beautiful new plans and build- 
ings of Yale, deliberately modelled not on classical har- 
mony but on Gothic irregularity and surprise. The 
grace and energy of the mediaeval architecture resur- 
rected by a man like Professor Cram of Boston has be- 
hind it not merely artistic but historical and ethical en- 
thusiasm; an enthusiasm for the Catholic creed which 
made mediaeval civilisation. Even on the huge Puritan 
plains of Middle West the influence strays in the strang- 
est fashion. And it is notable that among the pessimistic 
epitaphs of the Spoon River Anthology, in that church- 
yard compared with which most churchyards are cheery, 
among the suicides and secret drinkers and monomaniacs 
and hideous hypocrites of that happy village, almost the 
only record of respect and a recognition of wider hopes 
is dedicated to the Catholic priest. 

But Main Street is Main Street in the main. Main 
Street is Modern Street in its multiplicity of mildly half- 
educated people; and all these historic things are a thou- 
sand miles from them. They have not heard the ancient 
noise either of arts or arms ; the building of the cathe- 
dral or the marching of the crusade. But at least they 
have not deliberately slandered the crusade and defaced 
the cathedral. And if they have not produced the pea- 
sant arts, they can still produce the peasant crafts. They 
can sow and plough and reap and live by these everlasting 



94 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

things ; nor shall the foundations of theii" state be moved. 
And the memory of those colossal fields, of those fruitful 
deserts, came back the more readily into my mind because 
I finished these reflections in the very heart of a modern 
industrial city, if it can be said to have a heart. It was in 
fact an English industrial city, but it struck me that it 
might very well be an American one. And it also struck 
me that we yield rather too easily to America the dusty 
palm of industrial enterprise, and feel far too little appre- 
hension about greener and fresher vegetables. There is a 
story of an American wiho carefully studied all the sights 
of London or Rome or Paris, and came to the conclusion 
that 'it had nothing on Minneapolis.* It seems to me that 
Minneapolis has nothing on Manchester. There were the 
same grey vistas of shops full of rubber tyres and metallic 
appliances ; a man felt that he might walk a day without 
seeing a blade of grass; the whole horizon was so infi- 
nite with* efficiency. The factory chimneys might have 
been Pittsburg ; the sky-signs might have been New York. 
One looked up in a sort of despair at the sky, not for a 
sky-sign but in a sense for a sign, for some sentence of 
significance and judgment ; 'by the instinct that makes any 
man in such a scene seek for the only thing that has not 
been made by men. But even that was illogical, for it was 
night, and I could only expect to see the stars, which might 
have reminded* me of Old Glory ; but that was not the sign 
that oppressed me. All the ground was a wilderness of 
stone and all the buildings a forest of brick; I was far in 
the interior of a labyrinth of lifeless things. Only, look- 
ing up, between two black chimneys and a telegraph pole, 
I saw vast and far and faint, as the first men saw it, the 
silver pattern of the Plough. 



THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 

IT is a commonplace that men are all agreed in using 
symbols, and all differ about the meaning of the 
symbols. It is obvious that a Russian republican 
might come to identify the eagle as a bird of empire and 
therefore a bird of prey. But when he ultimately escaped 
to the land of the free, he might find the same bird on 
the American coinage figuring as a bird of freedom. 
Doubtless, he might find many other things to surprise 
him in the land of the free, and many calculated to make 
him think that the bird, if not imperial, was at least rather 
imperious. 

But I am not discussing those exceptional details here. 
It is equally obvious that a Russian reactionary might 
cross the world with a vow of vengeance against the red 
flag. But that authoritarian might have some difficulties 
with the authorities if he shot a man for using the red 
flag on the railway between Willesden and Clapham Junc- 
tion. 

But, of course, the difficulty about symbols is generally 
much more subtle than in these simple cases. I have re- 
marked elsewhere that the first thing which a traveller 
should write about is the thing which he lias not read 
about. It may be a small or secondary thing, but it is a 
thing that he has seen and not merely expected to see. 

I gave the example of the great multitude of wooden 
houses in America; we might say of wooden towns and 
wooden cities. But after he -has seen such things, his next 
!duty is to see the meaning of them ; and here a great deal 

95 



96 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

of complication and controversy is possible. The thing 
probably does not mean what he first supposes it to mean 
on the face of it ; but even on the face of it, it might mean 
many different and even opposite things. 

For instance, a wooden house might suggest an almost 
savage solitude ; a rude shanty put together by a pioneer in 
a forest; or it might mean a very recent and rapid solu- 
tion of the housing problem, conducted cheaply and there- 
fore on a very large scale A wooden house might sug- 
gest the very newest thing in American or one of the 
very oldest things in England. It might mean a grey 
ruin at Stratford or a white exhibition at Earl's Court. 

It is when we come to this interpretation of inter- 
national symbols that we make most of the international 
mistakes. Without the smallest error of detail, I will 
promise to prove -that Oriental women are independent 
because they wear trousers, or Oriental men subject be- 
cause they wear skirts. Merely to apply it to this case, I 
will take the example of two very commonplace and trivial 
objects of modern life — 3. walking stick and a fur coat. 

As it happened, I travelled about America with two 
sticks, like a Japanese nobleman with his two swords. I 
fear the simile is too stately. I bore more resemblance to 
a cripple with two crutches or a highly ineffectual version 
of the devil on two sticks. I carried them both because 
I valued them both, and did not wish to risk losing either 
of them in my erratic travels. One is a very plain grey 
stick from the woods of Buckinghamshire, but as I took it 
with me to Palestine it partakes of the character of a pil- 
grim's staff. When I can say that I have taken the same 
stick to Jerusalem and to Chicago, I think the stick and I 
may both have a rest. The other, which I value even 



THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 97 

more, was given me by the Knights of Columbus at Yale, 
and I wish I could think that their chivalric title allowed 
me to regard it as a sword. 

Now, I do not know whether the Americans I met, 
struck by the fastidious foppery of my dress and appear- 
ance, concluded that it is the custom of elegant English 
dandies to carry two walking sticks. But I do know that 
it is much less common among Americans than among 
Englishmen to carry even one. The point, however, is 
not merely that more sticks are carried by Englishmen 
than by Americans ; it is that the sticks which are carried 
by Americans stand for something entirely different. 

In America a stick is commonly called a cane, and it 
ihas about it something of the atmosphere which the poet 
described as the nice conduct of the clouded cane. It 
would be an exaggeration to say that when the citizens of 
the United States see a man carrying a light stick they 
deduce that if he does that he does nothing else. But 
there is about it a faint flavour of luxury and lounging, 
and most of the energetic citizens of this energetic society 
avoid it by instinct. 

Now, in an Englishman like myself, carrying a stick 
may imply lounging, but it does not imply luxury, and I 
can say with some firmness that it does not imply dandy- 
ism. In a great many Englishmen it means the very 
opposite even of lounging. By one of those fantastic 
paradoxes which are the mystery of nationality, a walk- 
ing stick often actually means walking. It frequently 
suggests the very reverse of the beau with his clouded 
cane ; it does not suggest a town type, but rathef specially 
a country type. It rather implies the kind of English- 
man who tramps about in lanes and meadows and knocks 



98 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

the tops off thistles. It suggests the sort of man who 
has carried the stick through his native woods, and per- 
haps even cut it in his native woods. 

Now there are plenty of these vigorous loungers, no 
doubt, in the rural parts of America, but the idea of a 
walking stick would not especially suggest them to 
Americans ; it would not call up such figures like a fairy 
wand. It would be easy to trace back the difference to 
many English origins, possibly to aristocratic origins, to 
the idea of the old squire, a man vigorous and even rustic, 
but trained to hold a useless stafif rather than a useful 
tool. 

It might be suggested that American citizens do at 
least so far love freedom as to like to have their hands 
free. It might be suggested, on the other hand, that they 
keep their hands for the handles of many machines. And 
that the hand on a handle is less free than the hand on 
a stick or even a tool. But these again axe controversial 
questions and I am only noting a fact. 

If an Englishman wished to imagine more or less 
exactly what the impression is, and how misleading it is, 
he could find something like a parallel in what he himself 
feels about a fur coat. When I first found myself among 
the crowds on the main floor of a New York hotel, my 
rather exaggerated impression of the luxury of the place 
was largely produced by the number of men in fur coats, 
and what we should consider rather ostentatious fur 
coats, with all the fur outside. 

Now an Englishman has a number of atmospheric but 
largely accidental associations in connection with a fur 
coat I will not say that he thinks a man in a fur coat 
must be a wealthy and wicked man ; but I do say that in 
his own ideal and perfect vision a wealthy and wicked 



THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 99 

man would wear a fur coat. Thus I had the sensation 
of standing in a surging mob of American millionaires, 
or even African millionaires; for the millionaires of 
Chicago must be like the Knights of the Round Table 
compared with" the millionaires of Johannesburg. 

But, as a matter of fact, the man in the fur coat was 
not even an American millionaire, but simply an Ameri- 
can. It did not signify luxury, but rather necessity, and 
even a harsh and almost heroic necessity. Orson prob- 
ably wore a fur coat; and he was brought up by bears, 
but not the bears of Wall Street. Eskimos are generally 
represented as a furry folk; but they are not necessarily 
engaged in delicate financial operations, even in the typical 
and appropriate occupation called freezing out. And if 
the American is not exactly an arctic traveller rushing 
from pole to pole, at least he is often literally fleeing from 
ice to ice. He has to make a very extreme distinction be- 
tween outdoor and indoor clothing. He has to live in an 
icehouse outside and a hothouse inside; so hot that he may 
be said to construct an icehouse inside that. He turns 
himself into an icehouse and warms himself against the 
cold until he is warm enough to eat ices. But the point 
is that the same coat of fur which in England would in- 
dicate the sybarite life may here very well indicate strenu- 
ous life; just as the same walking stick which would here 
suggest a lounger would in England suggest a plodder 
and almost a pilgrim. 

Now these two trifles are types which I should like 
to put, by way of proviso and apology, at the very begin- 
ning of any attempt at a record of any impressions of a 
f oreig'n society. They serve merely to illustrate the most 
important impression of all, the impression of how false 
all impressions may be. I suspect that most of the very 



loo WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

false impressions have come from careful record of very 
true facts. They have come from the fatal power of 
observing the facts without being able to observe the 
truth. They came from seeing the symbol with the most 
vivid clarity and being blind to all that it symbolises. 

It is as if a man who knew no Greek should imagine 
that he could read a Greek inscription because he took the 
Greek R for an English P or the Greek long E for an 
English H. I do not mention this merely as a criticism 
on other people's impressions of America, but as a criti- 
cism on my own. I wish it to be understood that I am 
well aware that all my views are subject to this sort of 
potential criticism, and that even when I am certain of the 
facts I do not profess to be certain of the deductions. 

In this chapter I hope to point out how a misunder- 
standing of this kind affects the common impression, 
not altogether unfounded, that the Americans talk about 
dollars. But for the moment I am merely anxious to 
avoid a similar misunderstanding when I talk about 
Americans. About the dogmas of democracy, about 
the right of a people to its own symbols, whether they be 
coins or customs, I am convinced, and no longer to be 
shaken. But about the meaning of those symbols, in 
silver or other substances, I am always open to correction. 
That error is the price we pay for the great glory of 
nationality. And in this sense I am quite ready, at the 
start, to warn my own readers against my own opinions. 

The fact without the truth is futile; indeed the fact 
without the truth is false. I have already noted that 
this is especially true touching our observations of a 
strange country; and it is certainly true touching one 
small fact which has swelled into a large fable. I mean 
the fable about America commonly summed up in the 



THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN loi 

phrase about the Almighty Dollar. I do not think the 
dollar is almighty in America; I fancy many things are 
mightier, including many ideals and some rather insane 
ideals. But I think it might be maintained that the dollar 
has another of the attributes of deity. If it is not om- 
nipotent it is in a sense omnipresent. Whatever Ameri- 
cans think about dollars, it is, I think, relatively true that 
they talk about dollars. If a mere mechanical record 
could be taken by the modern machinery of dictaphones 
and stenography, I do not think it probable that the mere 
word 'dollars' would occur more often in any given num- 
ber of American conversations than the mere word 
'pounds' or 'shillings' in a similar number of English 
conversations. And these statistics, like nearly all sta- 
tistics, would be utterly useless and even fundamentally 
false. It is as if we should calculate that the word 'ele- 
phant' had been mentioned a certain number of times in 
a particular London street, or so many times more often 
than the word 'thunderbolt' had been used in Stoke Poges. 
Doubtless there are statisticians capable of carefully col- 
lecting those statistics also ; and doubtless there are scien- 
tific social reformers capable of legislating on the basis of 
them. They would probably argue from the elephan- 
tine imagery of the London street that such and such a 
percentage of the householders were megalomaniacs and 
required medical care and police coercion. And doubt- 
less their calculations, like nearly all such calculations, 
would leave out the only important point; as that the 
street was in the immediate neighbourhood of the Zoo, 
or was yet more happily situated under the benignant 
shadow of the Elephant and Castle. And in the same 
way the mechanical calculation about the- mention of 
dollars is entirely useless unless we have some moral 



I02 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

understanding, of why they are mentioned. It certainly 
does not mean merely a love of money; and if it did, a 
love of money may mean a great many very different and 
even contrary things. The love of money is very differ- 
ent in a peasant or in a piratef, in a miser or in a gambler, 
in a great financier or in a man doing some practical and 
productive v^ork. Now this difference in the conversation 
of American and English business men arises, I think, 
from certain much deeper things in the American which 
are generally not understood by the Englishman. It also 
arises from much deeper things in the Englishman, of 
which the Englishman is even more ignorant. 

To begin with, I fancy that the American, quite apart 
from any love of money, has a great love of measure- 
ment. He will mention the exact size or weight of things 
in a way which appears to us as irrelevant. It is as if 
we were to say that a man came to see us carrying three 
feet of walking stick and four inches: of cigar. It is 
so in cases that have no possible connection with any 
avarice or greed for gain. An American will praise the 
prodigal generosity of some other man in giving up his 
own estate for the good of the poor. But he will gener- 
ally say that the philanthropist gave them a 200-acre 
park, where an Englishman would think it quite suffi- 
cient to say that he gave them a park. There is some- 
thing about this precision which seems suitable to the 
American atmosphere; to the hard sunlight, and the 
cloudless skies, and the glittering detail of the architecture 
and the landscape ; just as the vaguer English version is 
consonant to our mistier and more impressionist scenery. 
It is also connected perhaps with something more boyish 
about the younger civilisation; and corresponds to the 
passionate particularity with which a boy will distinguish 



THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 103 

the uniforms of regiments, the rigs of ships, or even the 
colours of tram tickets. It is a certain godlike appetite 
for things, as distinct from thoughts. 

But there is also, of course, a much deeper cause of the 
difference ; and it can easily be deduced by noting the real 
nature of the difference itself. When two business men 
in a train are talking about dollars, I am not so foolish 
as to expect them to be talking about the philosophy of 
St. Thomas Aquinas. But if they were two English 
business men I should not expect them to be talking 
about business. Probably it would be about some sport ; 
and most probably some sport in which they themselves 
never dreamed of indulging. The approximate differ- 
ence is that the American talks about his work and the 
Englishman about his holidays. His ideal is not labour 
but leisure. Like every other national characteristic, 
this is not primarily a point for praise or blame; in 
essence it involves neither and in effect it involves both. 
It is certainly connected with that snobbishness which is 
the great sin of English society. The Englishman does 
love to conceive himself as a sort of country gentleman; 
and his castles in the air are all castles in Scotland rather 
than in Spain. For, as an ideal, a Scotch castle is as 
English as a Welsh rarebit or an Irish stew. And if he 
talks less about money I fear it is mostly because in one 
sense he thinks more of it. Money is a mystery in the 
old and literal sense of something too sacred for speech, 
Gold is a god ; and like the god of some agnostics has no 
name, and is worshipped only in his works. It is true in 
a sense that the English gentleman wishes to have enough 
money to be able to forget it. But it may be questioned 
whether he does entirely forget it. As against this 
weakness the American has succeeded, at the price of a 



I04 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

great deal of crudity and clatter, in making general a 
very real respect for work. He has partly disenchanted 
the dangerous glamour of the gentleman, and in that 
sense has achieved some degree of democracy; which is 
the most difficult achievement in the world. 

On the other hand, there is a good side to the English- 
man's day-dream of leisure, and one which the American 
spirit tends to miss. It may be expressed in the word 
'holiday' or still better in the word 'hobby.' The 
Englishman, in his character of Robin Hood, really has 
g'ot two strings to his bow. Indeed the Englishman 
really is well represented by Robin Hood; for there is 
always something about him that may literally be called 
outlawed, in the sense of being extra-legal or outside the 
rules. A Frenchman said of Browning that his centre 
was not in the middle; and it may be said of many an 
Englishman that his heart is not where his treasure is. 
Browning expressed a very English sentiment when he 
said : — 

I like to know a butcher paints, 
A baker rhymes for his pursuit, 
Candlestick-maker much acquaints 
His soul with song, or haply mute 
Blows out his brains upon the flute. 

Stevenson touched on the same insular sentiment when 
he said that many men he knew, who were meat-salesmen 
to the outward eye, might in the life of contemplation 
sit with the saints. Now the extraordinary achieve- 
ment of the American meat-salesman is that his poetic 
enthusiasm can really be for meat sales; not for money 
but for meat. An American commercial traveller asked 
me, with a religious fire in his eye, whether I did not think 



THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 105 

that salesmanship could be an art. In England there are 
many salesmen who are sincerely fond of art ; but seldom 
of the art of salesmanship. Art is with them a hobby; 
a thing of leisure and liberty. That is why the English 
traveller talks, if not of art, then of sport. That is why 
the two city men in the London train, if they are not talk- 
ing about golf, may be talking about gardening. If they 
are not talking about dollars, or the equivalent of dollars, 
the reason lies much deeper than any superficial praise or 
blame touching the desire for wealth. In the English 
case, at least, it lies very deep in the English spirit. 
Many of the greatest English things have had this lighter 
and looser character of a hobby or a holiday experiment. 
Even a masterpiece has often been a by-product. The 
works of Shakespeare come out so casually that they can 
be attributed to the most improbable people; even to 
Bacon. The sonnets of Shakespeare are picked up after- 
wards as if out of a wastepaper basket. The immortal- 
ity of Dr. Johnson does not rest on the written leaves he 
collected, but entirely on the words he wasted, the words 
he scattered to the winds. So great a thing as Pickwick 
is almost a kind of accident; it began as something sec- 
ondary and grew into something primary and pre- 
eminent. It began with mere words written to illustrate 
somebody else's pictures; and swelled like an epic ex- 
panded from an epigram. It might almost be said that 
in the case of Pickwick the author began as the servant 
of the artist. But, as in the same story of Pickwick, the 
servant became greater than the master. This incalcu- 
lable and accidental quality, like all national qualities, has 
its strength and weakness ; but it does represent a certain 
reserve fund of interests in the Englishman's life; and 
distinguishes him from the other extreme type, of the 



io6 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

millionaire who works till he drops, or who drops be- 
cause he stops working. It is the great achievement of 
American civilisation that in that country it really is not 
cant to talk about the dignity of labour. There is some- 
thing that might almost be called the sanctity of labour; 
but it is subject to the profound law that when anything 
less than the highest becomes a sanctity, it tends also to 
become a superstition. When the candlestick-maker 
does not blow out his brains upon the flute, there is 
always a danger that he may blow them out somewhere 
else, owing to depressing conditions in the candlestick 
market. 

Now certainly one of the first impressions of America, 
or at any rate of New York, which is by no means the 
same thing as America, is that of a sort of mob of busi- 
ness men, behaving in many ways in a fashion very dif- 
ferent from that of the swarms of London city men who 
go up every day to the city. They sit about in groups 
with Red-Indian gravity, as if passing the pipe of peace; 
though, in fact, most of them are smoking cigars and 
some of them are eating cigars. The latter strikes me as 
one of the most peculiar of transatlantic tastes, more pe- 
culiar than that of chewing gum. A man will sit for 
hours consuming a cigar as if it were a sugar-stick; but 
I should imagine it to be a very disagreeable sugar-stick. 
Why he attempts to enjoy a cigar without lighting it I do 
not know; whether it is a more economical way of carry- 
ing a mere symbol of commercial conservation; or 
whether something of the same queer outlandish morality 
that draws such a distinction between beer and ginger 
beer draws an equally ethical distinction between touch- 
ing tobacco and lighting it. For the rest, it would be 
easy to make a merely external sketch full of things 



THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 107 

equally strange ; for this can always be done in a strange 
country. I allow for the fact of all foreigners looking 
alike ; but I fancy that all those hard-featured faces, with 
spectacles and shaven jaws, do look rather alike, because 
they all like to make their faces hard. And with the 
mention of their mental attitude we realise the futility of 
any such external sketch. Unless we can see that these 
are something more than men smoking cigars and talking 
about dollars, we had much better not see them at all. 

It is customary to condemn the American as a mate- 
rialist because of his worship of success. But indeed 
this very worship, like any worship, even devil-worship, 
proves him rather a mystic than a materialist. The 
Frenchman who retires from business, when he has 
money enough to drink his wine and eat his omelette in 
peace, might much more plausibly be called a materialist 
by those who do not prefer to call him a man of sense. 
But Americans do worship success in the abstract, as a 
sort of ideal vision. They follow success rather than 
money; they follow money rather than meat and drink. 
If their national life in one sense is a perpetual game of 
poker, they are playing excitedly for chips or counters 
as well as for coins. And by the ultimate test of mate- 
rial enjoyment, like the enjoyment of an omelette, even a 
coin is itself a counter. The Yankee cannot eat chips as 
the Frenchman can eat chipped potatoes ; but neither can 
he swallow red cents as the Frenchman swallows red 
wine. Thus when people say of a Yankee that he wor- 
ships the dollar, they pay a compliment to his fine spirit- 
uality more true and delicate than they imagine. The 
dollar is an idol because it is an image; but it is an im- 
age of success and not of enjoyment. 

That this romance is also a religion is shown in the 



io8 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

fact that there is a queer sort of moraUty attached to 
it. The nearest parallel to it is something like the sense 
of honour in the old duelling days. There is not a 
material but a distinctly moral savour about the implied 
obligation to collect dollars or to collect chips. We hear 
too much in England of the phrase about 'making good' ; 
for no sensible Englishman favours the needless inter- 
larding of English v^ith scraps of foreign languages. 
But though it means nothing in English, it means some- 
thing very particular in American. There is a fine shade 
of distinction between succeeding and making good, pre- 
cisely because there must always be a sort of ethical echo 
in the word good. America does vaguely feel a man 
making good as something analogous to a man being 
good or a man doing good. It is connected with his 
serious self-respect and his sense of being worthy of 
those he loves. Nor is this curious crude idealism 
wholly insincere even when it drives him to what some 
of us would call stealing; any more than the duellist's 
honour was insincere when it drove him to what some 
would call murder. A very clever American play which 
I once saw acted contained a complete working model of 
this morality. A girl was loyal to, but distressed by, her 
engagement to a young man on whom there was a sort of 
cloud of humiliation. The atmosphere was exactly what 
it would have been in England if he had been accused of 
cowardice or card-sharping. And there was nothing 
whatever the matter with the poor young man except that 
some rotten mine or other in Arizona had not 'made 
good.' Now in England we should either be below or 
above that ideal of good. If we were snobs, we should 
be content to know that he was a gentleman of good 
connections, perhaps too much accustomed to private 



THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 109 

means to be expected to be business-like. If we were 
somewhat larger-minded people, we should know that he 
might be as wise as Socrates and as splendid as Bayard 
and yet be unfitted, perhaps one should say therefore be 
unfitted, for the dismal and dirty gambling of modern 
commerce. But whether we were snobbish enough to 
admire him for being an idler, or chivalrous enough to 
admire him for being an outlaw, in neither case should 
we ever really and in our hearts despise him for being a 
failure. For it is this inner verdict of instinctive ideal- 
ism that is the point at issue. Of course there is nothing 
new, or peculiar to the new world, about a man's engage- 
ment practically failing through his financial failure. 
An English girl might easily drop a man because he was 
poor, or she might stick to him faithfully and defiantly 
although he was poor. The point is that this girl was 
faithful but she was not defiant; that is, she was not 
proud. The whole psychology of the situation was that 
she shared the weird worldly idealism of her family, and 
it was wounded as her patriotism would have been 
wounded if he had betrayed his country. To do them 
justice, there was nothing to show that they would have 
had any real respect for a royal duke who had inherited 
millions; what the simple barbarians wanted was a man 
who could 'make good.' That the process of making 
good would probably drag him through the mire of 
ever3rthing bad, that he would make good by bluffing, 
lying, swindling, and grinding the faces of the poor, did 
not seem to trouble them in the least. Against this fa- 
naticism there is this shadow of truth even in the fiction 
of aristocracy; that a gentleman may at least be allowed 
to be good without being bothered to make it. 

Another objection to the phrase about the almighty 



no WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

dollar is that it is an almighty phrase, and therefore an 
almighty nuisance. I mean that it is made to explain 
everything, and to explain everything much too well; 
that is, much too easily. It does not really help people 
to understand a foreign country; but it gives them the 
fatal illusion that they do understand it. Dollars stood 
for America as frogs stood for France; because it was 
necessary to connect particular foreigners with some- 
thing, or it would be so easy to confuse a Moor with a 
Montenegrin or a Russian with a Red Indian. The only 
cure for this sort of satisfied familiarity is the shock of 
something really unfamiliar. When people can see 
nothing at all in American democracy except a Yankee 
running after a dollar, then the only thing to do is to trip 
them up as they run after the Yankee, or run away with 
their notion of the Yankee, by the obstacle of certain odd 
and obstinate facts that have no relation to that notion. 
And, as a matter of fact, there are a number of such 
obstacles to any such generalisation; a number of notable 
facts that have to be reconciled somehow to our previous 
notions. It does not matter for this purpose whether the 
facts are favourable or unfavourable, or whether the 
qualities are merits or defects; especially as we do not 
even understand them sufficiently to say which they are. 
The point is that we are brought to a pause, and com- 
pelled to attempt to understand them rather better than 
we do. We have found the one thing that we did not 
expect; and therefore the one thing that we cannot ex- 
plain. And we are moved to an effort, probably an un- 
successful effort, to explain it. 

For instance, Americans are very unpunctual. That 
is the last thing that a critic expects who comes to con- 
demn them for hustling and haggling and vulgar avarice. 



THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN in 

But it is almost the first fact that strikes the spectator on 
the spot. The chief difference between the humdrum 
English business man and the hustling American business 
man is that the hustling American business man is 
always late. Of course there is a great deal of difference 
between coming late and coming too late. But I noticed 
the fashion first in connection with my own lectures; 
touching which I could heartily recommend the habit of 
coming too late. I could easily understand a crowd of 
commercial Americans not coming to my lectures at all; 
but there was something odd about their coming in a 
crowd, and the crowd being expected to turn up some 
time after the appointed hour. The managers of these 
lectures (I continue to call them lectures out of courtesy 
to myself) often explained to me that it was quite use- 
less to begin properly until about half an hour after time. 
Often people were still coming in three-quarters of an 
hour or even an hour after time. Not that I objected to 
that, as some lectures are said to do; it seemed to me 
an agreeable break in the monotony ; but as a characteris- 
tic of a people mostly engaged in practical business, it 
struck me as curious and interesting. I have grown ac- 
customed to being the most unbusinesslike person in any 
given company; and it gave me a sort of dizzy exaltation 
to find I was not the most unpunctual person in that com- 
pany. I was afterwards told by many Americans that 
my impression was quite correct ; that American unpunc- 
tuality was really very prevalent, and extended to much 
more important things. But at least I was not content to 
lump this along with all sorts of contrary things that I 
did not happen to like, and call it America. I am not 
sure of what it really means, but I rather fancy that 
though it may seem the very reverse of the hustling, it 



112 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

has the same origin as the hustling. The American is 
not punctual because he is not punctilious. He is im- 
pulsive, and has an impulse to stay as well as impulse to 
go. For, after all, punctuality belongs to the same order 
of Ideas as punctuation; and there is no punctuation 
in telegrams. The order of clocks and set hours 
which English business has always observed Is a good 
thing in its own way; indeed I think that In a larger 
sense it is better than the other way. But it is better 
because it is a protection against hustling, not a promo- 
tion of it. In other words, it Is better because it Is more 
civilised; as a great Venetian merchant prince clad in 
cloth of gold was more civilised; or an old English 
merchant drinking port In an oak-panelled room was 
more civilised ; or a little French shopkeeper shutting up 
his shop to play dominoes Is more civilised. And the 
reason is that the American has the romance of business 
and is monomaniac, while the Frenchman has the ro- 
mance of life and Is sane. But the romance of business 
really is a romance, and the Americans are really roman- 
tic about it. And that romance, though It revolves 
round pork or petrol, is really like a love-affair in this; 
that it Involves not only rushing but also lingering. 

The American is too busy to have business habits. 
He is also too much in earnest to have business rules. 
If we wish to understand him, we must compare him not 
with the French shopkeeper when he plays dominoes, 
but with the same French shopkeeper when he works the 
guns or mans the trenches as a conscript soldier. Every- 
body used to the punctilious Prussian standard of uni- 
form and parade has noticed the roughness and apparent 
laxity of the French soldier, the looseness of his clothes, 
the unsightliness of his heavy knapsack, in short his infe- 



THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 113 

tiority in every detail of the business of war except fight- 
ing. There he is much too swift to be smart. He is 
much too practical to be precise. By a strange illusion 
which can lift pork-packing almost to the level of patri- 
otism, the American has the same free rhythm in his 
romance of business. He varies his conduct not to suit 
the clock but to suit the case. He gives more time to 
more important and less time to less important things; 
and he makes up his time-table as he goes along. Sup- 
pose he has three appointments; the first, let us say, is 
some mere trifle of erecting a tower twenty storeys high 
and exhibiting a sky-sign on the top of it; the second is a 
business discussion about the possibility of printing ad- 
vertisements of soft drinks on the table-napkins at a 
restaurant; the third is attending a conference to decide 
how the populace can be prevented from using chewing- 
gum and the manufacturers can still manage to sell it. 
He will be content merely to glance at the sky-sign as he 
goes by in a trolley-car or an automobile; he will then 
settle down to the discussion with his partner about the 
table-napkins, each speaker indulging in long monologues 
in turn; a peculiarity of much American conversation. 
Now if in the middle of one of these monologues, he sud- 
denly thinks that the vacant space of the waiter's shirt- 
front might also be utilised to advertise the Gee Whiz 
Ginger Champagne, he will instantly follow up the new 
idea in all its aspects and possibilities, in an even longer 
monologue; and will never think of looking at his watch 
while he is rapturously looking at his waiter. The con- 
sequence is that he will come late into the great social 
movement against chew.ing-gum, where an Englishman 
would probably have arrived at the proper hour. But 
though the Englishman's conduct is more proper, it need 



114 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

not be in all respects more practical. The Englishman's 
rules are better for the business of life, but not necessarily 
for the life of business. And it is true that for many of 
these Americans business is the business of life. It is 
really also, as I have said, the romance of life. We shall 
admire or deplore this spirit, in proportion as we are glad 
to see trade irradiated with so much poetry, or sorry to 
see so much poetry wasted on trade. But it does make 
many people happy, like any other hobby ; and one is dis- 
posed to add that it does fill their imaginations like any 
other delusion. For the true criticism of all this com- 
mercial romance would involve a criticism of this historic 
phase of commerce. These people are building on the 
sand, though it shines like gold, and for them like fairy 
gold ; but the world will remember the legend about fairy 
gold. Half the financial operations they follow deal with 
things that do not even exist ; for in that sense all finance 
is a fairy-tale. Many of them are buying and selling 
things that do nothing but harm ; but it does them good 
to buy and sell them. The claim of the romantic sales- 
man is better justified than he realises. Business really 
is romance; for it is not reality. 

There is one real advantage that America has over 
England, largely due to its livelier and more impression- 
able ideal. America does not think that stupidity is prac- 
tical. It does not think that ideas are merely destructive 
things. It does not think that a genius is only a person 
to be told to go away and blow his brains out ; rather it 
would open all its machinery to the genius and beg him to 
blow his brains in. It might attempt to use a natural 
force like Blake or Shelley for very ignoble purposes; it 
would be quite capable of asking Blake to take his tiger 
and his golden lions round as a sort of Barnum's show, or 



THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 115 

Shelley to hang his stars and haloed clouds among the 
lights of Broadway. But it would not assume that a 
natural force is useless, any more than that Niagara is 
useless. And there is a very definite distinction here 
touching the intelligence of the trader, whatever we may 
think of either course touching the intelligence of the art- 
ist. It is one thing that Apollo should be employed by 
Admetus, although he is a god. It is quite another thing 
that Apollo should always be sacked by Admetus, because 
he is a god. Now in England, largely owing to the acci- 
dent of a rivalry and therefore a comparison with France, 
there arose about the end of the eighteenth century an 
extraordinary notion that there was some sort of connec- 
tion between dullness and success. What the Americans 
call a bonehead became what the English call a hard- 
headed man. The merchants of London evinced their 
contempt for the fantastic logicians of Paris by living in 
a permanent state of terror lest somebody should set the 
Thames on fire. In this as in much else it is much easier 
to understand the Americans, if we connect them with 
the French who were their allies than with the English 
who were their enemies. There are a great many 
Franco- American resemblances which the practical Anglo- 
Saxons are of course too hard-headed (or boneheaded) 
to see. American history is haunted with the shadow of 
the Plebiscitary President; they have a tradition of classi- 
cal architecture for public buildings. Their cities are 
planned upon the squares of Paris and not upon the 
labyrinth of London. They call their cities Corinth and 
Syracuse, as the French called their citizens Epaminon- 
das and Timoleon. Their soldiers wore the French kepi ; 
and they make coffee admirably, and do not make tea at 
all. But of all the French elements in America the most 



ii6 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

French is this real practicaHty. They know that at cer- 
tain times the most businessHke of all qualities is 
Taudace, et encore de I'audace, et tou jours de I'audace.' 
The publisher may induce the poet to do a pot-boiler; 
but the publisher would cheerfully allow the poet to set 
the Miss,issippi on fire, if it would boil his particular pot. 
It is not so much that Englishmen are stupid as that they 
are afraid of being clever; and it is not so much that 
Americans are clever as that they do not try to be any 
stupider than they are. The fire of French logic has 
burnt that out of America as it has burnt it out of 
jEurope, and of almost every place except England. 
This is one of the few points on which England insularity 
really is a disadvantage. It is the fatal notion that the 
only sort of commonsense is to be found in compromise, 
and that the only sort of compromise is to be found in 
confusion. This must be clearly distinguished from the 
commonplace about the utilitarian world not rising to the 
invisible values of genius. Under this philosophy the 
utilitarian does not see the utility of genius, even when 
it is quite visible. He does not see it, not because he is a 
utilitarian, but because he is an idealist whose ideal is 
dullness. For some time the English aspired to be 
stupid, prayed and hoped with soaring spiritual ambition 
to be stupid. But with all their worship of success, they 
did not succeed in being stupid. The natural talents of 
a great and traditional nation were always breaking out 
in spite of them. In spite of the merchants of London, 
Turner did set the Thames on fire. In spite of our re- 
peatedly explained preference for real,ism to romance, 
Europe persisted in resounding with the name of Byron. 
And just when we had made it perfectly clear to the 
French that we despised all their flamboyant tricks, that 



THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN 117 

we were a plain prosaic people and there was no fantastic 
glory or chivalry about us, the very shaft we sent against 
them shone with the name of Nelson, a shooting and a 
falling star. 



PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 

ALL good Americans wish to fight the represen- 
tatives they have chosen. All good Englishmen 
wish to forget the representatives they have 
chosen. This difference, deep and perhaps ineradicable in 
the temperaments of the two peoples, explains a thousand 
things in their literature and their laws. The American 
national poet praised his people for their readiness 'to 
rise against the never-ending audacity of elected persons.* 
The English national anthem is content to say heartily, 
but almost hastily, 'Confound their politics,' and then 
more cheerfully, as if changing the subject, 'God save 
the King.* For this is especially the secret of the mon- 
arch or chief magistrate in the two countries. They 
arm the President with the powers of a King, that he 
may be a nuisance in politics. We deprive the King even 
of the powers of a President, lest he should remind us 
of a politician. We desire to forget the never-ending 
audacity of elected persons; and with us therefore it 
really never does end. That is the practical objection 
to our own habit of changing the subject, instead of 
changing the ministry. The King, as the Irish wit 
observed, is not a subject; but in that sense the English 
crowned head is not a King. He is a popular figure in- 
tended to remind us of the England that politicians do 
not remember; the England of horses and ships and gar- 
dens and good fellowship. The Americans have no such 
purely social symbol; and it is rather the root than the 

118 



PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 119 

result of this that their social luxury, and especially 
their sport, are a little lacking in humanity and hu- 
mour. It is the American, much more than the Eng- 
lishman, who takes his pleasures sadly, not to say sav- 
agely. 

The genuine popularity of constitutional monarchs, in 
parliamentary countries, can be explained by any practi- 
cal example. Let us suppose that great social reform, 
The Compulsory Haircutting Act, has just begun to be 
enforced. The Compulsory Haircutting Act, as every 
good citizen knows, is a statute which permits any person 
to grow his hair to any length, in any wild or wonderful 
shape, so long as he is registered with a hairdresser who 
charges a shilling. But it imposes a universal close- 
shave (like that which is found so hygienic during a cura- 
tive detention at Dartmoor) on all who are registered 
only with a barber who charges threepence. Thus, while 
the ornamental classes can continue to ornament the 
street with Piccadilly weepers or chin-beards if they 
choose, the working classes demonstrate the care with 
which the State protects them by going about in a 
fresher, cooler and cleaner condition; a condition which 
has the further advantage of revealing at a glance that 
outline of the criminal skull, which is so common among 
them. The Compulsory Haircutting Act is thus in every 
way a compact and convenient example of all our current 
laws about education, sport, liquor, and liberty in general. 
Well, the law has passed, and the masses, insensible to its 
scientific value,* are still murmuring against it. The ig- 
norant peasant maiden is averse to so extreme a fashion 
of bobbing her hair; and does not see how she can even be 
a flapper with nothing to flap. Her father, his mind 
already poisoned by Bolshevists, begins to wonder who 



I20 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

the devil does these things, and why. In proportion as 
he knows the world of to-day, he guesses that the real 
origin may be quite obscure, or the real motive quite cor- 
rupt. The pressure may have come from anybody who 
has gained power or money anyhow. It may come from 
the foreign millionaire who owns all the expensive hair- 
dressing saloons ; it may come from some swindler in the 
cutlery trade who has contracted to sell a million bad 
razors. Hence the poor man looks about him with sus- 
picion in the street; knowing that the lowest sneak or 
the loudest snob he sees may be directing the government 
of his country. Anybody may have to do with politics; 
and this sort of thing is politics. Suddenly he catches 
sight of a crowd, stops, and begins wildly to cheer a 
carriage that is passing. The carriage contains the one 
person who has certainly not originated any great scien- 
tific reform. He is the only person in the common- 
wealth who is not allowed to cut off other people's hair, 
or to take away other people's liberties. He at least is 
kept out of politics; and men hold him up as they did an 
unspotted victim to appease the wrath of the gods. He 
is their King, and the only man they know is not their 
ruler. We need not be surprised that he is popular, 
knowing how they are ruled. 

The popularity of a President in America is exactly 
the opposite. The American Republic is the last medi- 
aeval monarchy. It is intended that the President 
shall rule, and take all the risks of ruling. If the hair is! 
cut he is the haircutter, the magistrate that bears not the 
razor in vain. All the popular Presidents, Jackson and 
Lincoln and Roosevelt, have acted as democratic despots, 
but emphatically not as constitutional monarchs. In 



PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 121 

short, the names have become curiously interchanged; 
and as a historical reality it is the President who ought 
to be called a King. 

But it is not only true that the President could cor- 
rectly be called a King. It is also true that the King 
might correctly be called a President. We could hardly 
find a more exact description of him than to call him a 
President. What is expected in modern times o£ a mod- 
ern constitutional monarch is emphatically that he should 
preside. We expect him to take the throne exactly as 
if he were taking the chair. The chairman does not 
move the motion or resolution, far less vote it ; he is not 
supposed even to favour it. He is expected to please 
everybody by favouring nobody. The primary essentials 
of a President or Chairman are that he should be treated 
with ceremonial respect, that he should be popular in 
his personality and yet impersonal in his opinions, and 
that he should actually be a link between all the other 
persons by being different from all of them. This is 
exactly what is demanded of the constitutional monarch 
in modern times. It is exactly the opposite to the 
American position; in which the President does not 
preside at all. He moves; and the thing he moves may 
truly be called a motion ; for the national idea is perpet- 
ual motion. Technically it is called a message; and 
might often actually be called a menace. Thus we may 
truly say that the King presides and the President reigns. 
Some would prefer to say that the President rules; and 
some Senators and members of Congress would prefer to 
say that he rebels. But there is no doubt that he moves ; 
he does not take the chair or even the stool, but rather 
the stump. 



122 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

Some people seem to suppose that the fall of President 
Wilson was a denial of this almost despotic ideal in 
America. As a matter of fact it was the strongest 
possible assertion of it. The idea is that the President 
shall take responsibility and risk; and responsibility 
means being blamed, and risk means the risk of being 
blamed. The theory is that things are done by the 
President; and if things go wrong, or are alleged to go 
wrong, it is the fault of the President. This does not 
invalidate, but rather ratifies the comparison with true 
monarchs such as the mediaeval monarchs. Constitu- 
tional princes are seldom deposed ; but despots were often 
deposed. In the simpler races of sunnier lands, such as 
Turkey, they were commonly assassinated. Even in our 
own history a King often received the same respectful 
tribute to the responsibility and reality of his office. But 
King John was attacked because he was strong, not 
because he wa)S weak. Richard the Second lost the 
crown because the crown was a trophy, not because it 
was a trifle. And President Wilson was deposed be- 
cause he had used a power which is such, in its nature, 
that a man must use it at the risk of deposition. As a 
matter of fact, of course, it is easy to exaggerate Mr. 
Wilson's real unpopularity, and still more easy to exag- 
gerate Mr. Wilson's real failure. There are a great 
many people in America who justify and applaud him; 
and what is yet more interesting, who justify him not on 
pacifist and idealistic, but on patriotic and even military 
grounds. It is especially insisted by some that his dem- 
onstration, which seemed futile as a threat against 
Mexico, was a very far-sighted preparation for the threat 
against Prussia. But in so far as the democracy did 
disagree with him, it was but the occasional and inevi- 



PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 123 

table result of the theory by which the despot has to 
anticipate the democracy. 

Thus the American King and the English President 
are the very opposite of each other; yet they are both the 
varied and very national indications of the same con- 
temporary truth. It is the great weariness and contempt 
that have fallen upon common politics in both countries. 
It may be answered, with some show of truth, that the 
new American President represents a return to common 
politics ; and that in that sense he marks a real rebuke to 
the last President and his more uncommon politics. And 
it is true that many who put Mr. Harding in power 
regard him as the symbol of something which they call 
normalcy; which may roughly be translated into English 
by the word normality. And by this they do mean, more 
or less, the return to the vague capitalist conservatism 
of the nineteenth century. They might call Mr. Harding 
a Victorian if they had ever lived under Victoria. Per- 
haps these people do entertain the extraordinary notion 
that the nineteenth century was normal. But there are 
very few who think so, and even they will not think so 
long. The blunder is the beginning of nearly all our 
present troubles. The nineteenth century was the very 
reverse of normal. It suffered a most unnatural strain 
in the combination of political equality in theory with 
extreme economic inequality in practice. Capitalism 
was not a normalcy but an abnormalcy. Property is 
normal, and is more normal in proportion as it is univer- 
sal. Slavery may be normal and even natural, in the 
sense that a bad habit may be a second nature. But Cap- 
italism was never anything so human as a habit ; we may 
say it was never anything so good as a bad habit. It was 
never a custom; for men never grew accustomed to it. 



124 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

It was never even conservative; for before it was even 
created wise men had realised that it could not be con- 
served. It was from the first a problem ; and those who 
will not even admit the Capitalist problem deserve to get 
the Bolshevist solution. All things considered, I cannot 
say anything worse of them than that. 

The recent Presidential election preserved some trace 
of the old Party System of America; but its tradition 
has very nearly faded like that of the Party System of 
England. It is easy for an Englishman to confess that 
he never quite understood the American Party System. 
It would perhaps be more courageous in him, and more 
informing, to confess that he never really understood the 
British Party System. The planks in the two American 
platforms may easily be exhibited as very disconnected 
and ramshackle; but our own party was as much of a 
patchwork, and indeed I think even more so. Every- 
body knows that the two American factions were called 
'Democrat' and 'Republican.' It does not at all cover 
the case to identify the former with Liberals and the 
latter with Conservatives. The Democrats are the party 
of the South and have some true tradition from the 
Southern aristocracy and the defence of Secession and 
State Rights. The Republicans rose in the North as the 
party of Lincoln, largely condemning slavery. But the 
Republicans are also the party of Tariffs, and are at least 
accused of being the party of Trusts. The Democrats 
are the party of Free Trade ; and in the great movement 
of twenty years ago the party of Free Silver. The 
Democrats are also the party of the Irish; and the stones 
they throw at Trusts are retorted by stones thrown at 
Tammany. It is easy to see all these things as curiously 
sporadic and bewildering ; but I am inclined to think that 



PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 125 

they are as a whole more coherent and rational than our 
own old division of Liberals and Conservatives. There 
is even more doubt nowadays about what is the connecting 
link betwen the different items in the old British party 
programmes. I have never been able to understand why 
being in favour of Protection should have anything to do 
with being opposed to Home Rule ; especially as most of 
the people who were to receive Home Rule were them- 
selves in favour of Protection. I could never see what 
giving people cheap bread had to do with forbidding them 
cheap beer; or why the party which sympathises with 
Ireland cannot sympathise with Poland. I cannot see 
why Liberals did not liberate public-houses or Conserva- 
tives conserve crofters. I do not understand the principle 
upon which the causes were selected on both sides ; and 
I incline to think that it was with the impartial object of 
distributing nonsense equally on both sides. Heaven 
knows there is enough nonsense in American politics too ; 
towering and tropical nonsense like a cyclone or an earth- 
quake. But when all is said, I incline to think that there 
was more spiritual and atmospheric cohesion in the dif- 
ferent parts of the American party than in those of the 
English party ; and I think this unity was all the more real 
because it was more difficult to define. The Republican 
party originally stood for the triumph of the North, and 
the North stood for the nineteenth century ; that is for the 
characteristic commercial expansion of the nineteenth cen- 
tury; for a firm faith in the profit and progress of its 
great and growing cities, its division of labour, its indus- 
trial science, and its evolutionary reform. The Demo- 
cratic party stood more loosely for all the elements that 
doubted whether this development was democratic or was 
desirable; all that looked back to Jeffersonian idealism 



126 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

and the serene abstractions of the eighteenth century, 
or forward to Bryanite idealism and some simpHfied 
Utopia founded on grain rather than gold. Along with 
this went, not at all unnaturally, the last and lingering 
sentiment of the Southern squires, who remembered a 
more rural civilisation that seemed by comparison roman- 
tic. Along with this went, quite logically, the passions 
and the pathos of the Irish, themselves a rural civilisation, 
whose basis is a religion or what the nineteenth century 
tended to call a superstition. Above all, it was perfectly 
natural that this tone of thought should favour local 
liberties, and even a revolt on behalf of local liberties, and 
should distrust the huge machine of centralised power 
called the Union. In short, something very near the 
truth was said by a suicidally silly Republican orator, who 
was running Blaine for the Presidency, when he de- 
nounced the Democratic party as supported by 'Rome, 
rum, and rebellion.* They seem to me to be three excel- 
lent things In their place; and that Is why I suspect that 
I should have belonged to the Democratic party, if I had 
been born In America when there was a Democratic party. 
But I fancy that by this time even this general distinction 
has become very dim. If I had been an American twenty 
years ago, in the time of the great Free Silver campaign, 
I should certainly never have hesitated for an Instant 
about my sympathies or my side. My feelings would 
have been exactly those that are nobly expressed by Mr. 
Vachell Lindsay, In a poem bearing the characteristic title 
of 'Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan.* And, by the way, 
nobody can begin to sympathise with America whose soul 
does not to 'some extent begin to swing and dance to the 
drums and gongs of Mr. Vachell Lindsay's great orches- 
tra; which has the note of his whole nation in this: that 



i 



PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 127 

a refined person can revile it a hundred times over as vul- 
gar and brazen and barbarous and absurd, but not as 
insincere; there is something in it, and that something is 
the soul of many million men. But the poet himself, in 
the political poem referred to, speaks of Bryan's fall over 
(Free Silver as ^defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my 
dream' ; and it is only too probable that the cause has 
fallen as well as the candidate. The William Jennings 
Bryan of later years is not the man whom I should have 
seen in my youth, with the visionary eyes of Mr. Vachell 
Lindsay. He has become a commonplace Pacifist, which 
is in its nature the very opposite of a revolutionist; for 
if men will fight rather than sacrifice humanity on a golden 
cross, it cannot be wrong for them to resist its being 
sacrificed to an iron cross. I came into very indirect con- 
tact with Mr. Bryan when I was in America, in a fashion 
that made me realise how it has become to recover the 
illusions of a Bryanite. I believe that my lecture agent 
was anxious to arrange a debate, and I threw out a sort 
of loose challenge to the effect that woman's suffrage had 
weakened the position of woman; and while I was away 
in the wilds of Oklahoma my lecture agent (a man of 
blood-curdling courage and enterprise) asked Mr. Bryan 
to debate with me. Now Mr. Bryan is one of the great- 
est orators of modern history, and there is no conceivable 
reason why he should trouble to debate with a wandering 
lecturer. But as a matter of fact he expressed himself 
in the most magnanimous and courteous terms about my 
personal position, but said (as I understood) that it 
would be improper to debate on female suffrage as it w^as 
already a part of the political system. And when I heard 
that, I could not help a sigh ; for I recognised something 
that I knew only too well on the front benches of my own 



128 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

beloved land. The great and glorious demagogue had de- 
generated into a statesman. I had never expected for 
a moment that the great orator could be bothered to debate 
with me at all ; but it had never occurred to me, as a gen- 
eral principle, that two educated men were for ever for- 
bidden to talk sense about a particular topic, because a lot 
of other people had already voted on it. What is the 
matter with that attitude is the loss of the freedom of the 
mind. There can be no liberty of thought unless it is 
ready to unsettle what has recently been settled, as well 
as what has long been settled. We are perpetually being 
told in the papers that what is wanted is a strong man who 
will do things. What is wanted is a strong man who 
will undo things; and that will be a real test of strength. 
Anyhow, we could have believed, in the time of the 
Free Silver fight, that the Democratic party was demo- 
cratic with a small d. In Mr. Wilson it was transfigured, 
his friends would say into a higher and his foes into a 
hazier thing. And the Republican reaction against him, 
even where it has been healthy, has also been hazy. In 
fact, it has been not so much the victory of a political 
party as a relapse into repose after certain political pas- 
sions; and in that sense there is a truth in the strange 
phrase about normalcy ; in the sense that there is nothing 
more normal than going to sleep. But an even larger 
truth is this ; it is most likely that America is no longer 
concentrated on these faction fights at all, but is consider- 
ing certain large problems upon which those factions 
hardly troubled to take sides. They are too large even to 
be classified as foreign policy distinct from domestic 
policy. They are so large as to be inside as well as out- 
side the state. From an English standpoint the most 
obvious example is the Irish ; for the Irish problem is not 



PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 129 

a British problem, but also an American problem. And 
this is true even of the great external enigma of Japan. 
The Japanese question may be a part of foreign policy 
for America, but it is a part of domestic policy for Cali- 
fornia. And the same is true of that other intense and 
intelligent Eastern people, the genius and limitations of 
which have troubled the world so much longer. What 
the Japs are in California, the Jews are in America. 
That is, they are a piece of foreign policy that has be- 
come imbedded in domestic policy; something which is 
found inside but still has to be regarded from the outside. 
On these great international matters I doubt if Americans 
got much guidance from their party system ; especially as 
most of these questions have grown very recently and 
rapidly to enormous size. Men are left free to judge of 
them with fresh minds. And that is the truth in the 
statement that the Washington Conference has opened 
the gates of a new world. 

On the relations to England and Ireland I will not 
attempt to dwell adequately here. I have already noted 
that my first Interview was with an Irishman, and my 
first impression from that interview a vivid sense of the 
importance of Ireland in Anglo-American relations; and 
I have said something of the Irish problem, prematurely 
and out of its proper order, under the stress of that sense 
of urgency. Here I will only add two remarks about the 
two countries respectively. A great many British 
journalists have recently imagined that they were pour- 
ing oil upon the troubled waters, when they were rather 
pouring out oil to smooth the downward path ; and to turn 
the broad road to destruction into a butter-slide. They 
seem to have no notion of what to do, except to say what 
they imagine the very stupidest of their readers would 



I30 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

be pleased to hear, and conceal whatever the most intelli- 
gent of their readers would probably like to know. They 
therefore informed the public that 'the majority of 
Americans' had abandoned all sympathy with Ireland, 
because of its alleged sympathy with Germany; and that 
this majority of Americans was now adherently in sym- 
pathy with its English brothers across the sea. Now to 
begin with, such critics have no notion of what they are 
saying when they talk about the majority of Americans. 
To anybody who has happened to look in, let us say, on 
the city of Omaha, Nebraska, the remark will have some- 
thing enormous and overwhelming about it. It is like 
saying that the majority of the inhabitants of China 
would agree with the Chinese Ambassador in a pref- 
erence for dining at the Savoy rather than the Ritz. 
There are millions and millions of people living in those 
great central plains of the North American Continent of 
whom it would be nearer the truth to say that they have 
never heard of England, or of Ireland either, than to say 
that their first emotional movement is a desire to come 
to the rescue of either of them. It is perfectly true that 
the more monomaniac sort of Sinn Feiner might some- 
times irritate this innocent and isolated American spirit 
by being pro-Irish. It is equally true that a traditional 
Bostonian or Virginian might irritate it by being pro- 
English. The only difference is that large numbers of 
pure Irishmen are scattered in those far places, and large 
numbers of pure Englishmen are not. But it is truest 
of all to say that neither England nor Ireland so much 
as crosses the mind of most of them once in six months. 
Painting up large notices of 'Watch us Grow,' making 
money by farming with machinery, together with an oc- 
casional hold-up with six-shooters and photographs of 



PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 131 

a beautiful murderess or divorcee, fill up the round of 
their good and happy lives, and fleet the time carelessly as 
in the golden age. 

But putting aside all this vast and distant democracy, 
which is the real 'majority of Americans,' and confining 
ourselves to that older culture on the eastern coast which 
the critics probably had in mind, we shall find the case 
more comforting but not to be covered with cheap and 
false comfort. Now it is perfectly true that any Eng- 
lishman coming to this eastern coast, as I did, finds him- 
self not only most warmly welcomed as a guest, but most 
cordially complimented as an Englishman. Men recall 
with pride the branches of their family that belong to 
England or the English counties where they were rooted ; 
and there are enthusiasms for English literature and his- 
tory which are as spontaneous as patriotism itself. 
Something of this may be put down to a certain promp- 
titude and flexibility in all American kindness, which is 
never sufficiently stodgy to be called good nature. The 
Englishman does sometimes wonder whether if he had 
been a Russian, his hosts would not have remembered re- 
mote Russian aunts and uncles and disinterred a Musco- 
vite great-grandmother; or whether if he had come from 
Iceland, they would not have known as much about Ice- 
landic sagas and been as sympathetic about the absence 
of Icelandic snakes. But with a fair review of the pro- 
portions of the case he will dismiss this conjecture, and 
come to the conclusion that a number of educated Ameri- 
cans are very warmly and sincerely sympathetic with 
England. 

What I began to feel, with a certain creeping chill, 
was that they were only too sympathetic with England. 
The word sympathetic has sometimes rather a double 



132 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

sense. The impression I received was that all these 
chivalrous Southerners and men mellow with Bostonian 
memories were rallying to England. They* were on the 
defensive; and it was poor old England that they were 
defending. Their attitude implied that somebody or 
something was leaving her undefended, or finding her 
indefensible. The burden of that hearty chorus was that 
England was not so black as she was painted; it seemed 
clear that somewhere or other she was being painted 
pretty black. But there was something else that made 
me uncomfortable; it was not only the sense of being 
somewhat boisterously forgiven; it was also something 
involving questions of power as well as morality. Then 
it seemed to me that a new sensation turned me hot and 
cold; and I felt something I have never before felt in a 
foreign land. Never had my father or my grandfather 
known that sensation; never during the great and com- 
plex and perhaps perilous expansion of our power and 
commerce in the last hundred years had an Englishman 
heard exactly that note in a human voice. England was 
being pitied. I, as an Englishman, was not only being 
pardoned but pitied. My country was beginning to be 
an object of compassion, like Poland or Spain. My first 
emotion, full of the mood and movement of a hundred 
years, was one of furious anger. But the anger has 
given place to anxiety; and the anxiety is not yet at an 
end. 

It is not my business here to expound my view of 
English politics, still less of European politics or the 
politics of the world; but to put down a few impressions 
of American travel. On many points of European poli- 
tics the impression will be purely negative ; I am sure that 
most Americans have no notion of the position of France 



PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 133 

or the position of Poland. But if English readers want 
the truth, I am sure this is the truth about their notion 
of the position of England. They are wondering, or those 
who are watching are wondering, whether the term of 
her success is come and she is going down the dark road 
after Prussia. Many are sorry if this is so ; some are glad 
if it is so; but all are seriously considering the probability 
of its being so. And herein lay especially the horrible 
folly of our Black-and-Tan terrorism over the Irish peo- 
ple. I have noted that the newspapers told us that Amer- 
ica had been chilled in its Irish sympathies by Irish detach- 
ment during the war. It is the painful truth that any 
advantage we might have had from this we ourselves 
immediately proceeded to destroy. Ireland might have 
put herself wrong with America by her attitude about 
Belgium, if England had not instantly proceeded to put 
herself more wrong by her attitude towards Ireland. It is 
quite true that two blacks do not make a white ; but you 
cannot send a black to reproach people with tolerating 
blackness ; and this is quite as true when one is a Black 
Brunswicker and the other a Black-and-Tan. It is true 
that since then England has made surprisingly sweeping 
concessions ; concessions so large as to increase the amaze- 
ment that the refusal should have been so long. But 
unfortunately the combination of the two rather clinches 
the conception of our decline. If the concession had 
come before the terror, it would have looked like an 
attempt to emancipate, and would probably have suc- 
ceeded. Coming so abruptly after the terror, it looked 
only like an attempt to tyrannise, and an attempt that 
failed. It was partly an inheritance from a stupid tradi- 
tion, which tried to combine what it called firmness with 
what it called conciliation; as if when we made up our 



134 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

minds to soothe a man with a five-pound note, we always 
took care to undo our own action by giving him a kick as 
well. The English politician has often done that ; though 
there is nothing to be said of such a fool except that he 
has wasted a fiver. But in this case he gave the kick 
(first, received a kicking in return, and then gave up the 
money; and it was hard for the bystanders to say any- 
thing except that he had been badly beaten. The com- 
bination and sequence of events seems almost as if it 
were arranged to suggest the dark and ominous par- 
allel. The first action looked only too like the invasion of 
iBelgium, and the second like the evacuation of Belgium. 
So that vast and silent crowd in the West looked at the 
British Empire, as men look at a great tower that has 
begun to lean. Thus it was that while I found real pleas- 
ure, I could not find unrelieved consolation in the sincere 
compliments paid to my country by so many cultivated 
Americans ; their memories of homely corners of historic 
counties from which their fathers came, of the cathe- 
dral that dwarfs the town, or the inn at the turning of 
the road. There was something in their voices and the 
look in their eyes which from the first disturbed me. 
So I have heard good Englishmen, who died afterwards 
the death of soldiers, cry aloud in 1914, 'It seems impos- 
sible of those jolly Bavarians !' or, T will never believe it, 
when I think of the time I had at Heidelberg !' 

But there are other things besides the parallel of Prus- 
sia or the problem of Ireland. The American press is 
much freer than our own; the American public is much 
more familiar with the discussion of corruption than our 
own; and it is much more conscious of the corruption 
of our politics than we are. Almost any man in America 
may talk of the Marconi Case; many a man in England 



PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 135 

does not even know what it means. Many imagine that 
it had something to do with the propriety of politicians 
speculating on the Stock Exchange. So that it mean^ 
a great deal to Americans to say that one figure in thaf 
drama is ruling India and another is ruling Palestine. 
And this brings me to another problem, which is also 
dealt with much more openly in America than in England. 
I mention it here only because it is a perfect model of the 
misunderstandings in the modern world. If any one asks 
for an example of exactly how the important part of every 
story is left out, and even the part that is reported is not 
understood, he could hardly have a stronger case than 
the story of Henry Ford of Detroit. 

When I was in Detroit I had the pleasure of meeting 
Mr. Ford, and it really was a pleasure. He is a man 
quite capable of views which I think silly to the point of 
insanity; but he is not the vulgar benevolent boss. It 
must be admitted that he is a millionaire; but he cannot 
really be convicted of being a philanthropist. He is not 
a man who merely wants to run people; it is rather his 
views that run him, and perhaps run away with him. 
He has a distinguished and sensitive face; he really in- 
vented things himself, unlike most men who profit by 
inventions; he is something of an artist and not a little 
of a fighter, A man of that type is always capable of 
being wildly wrong, especially in the sectarian atmos- 
phere of America; and Mr. Ford has been wrong before 
and may be wrong now. He is chiefly known in Eng- 
land for a project which I think very preposterous; that 
of the Peace Ship, which came to Europe during the war. 
But he is not known in England at all in connection with 
a much more important campaign, which he has conducted 
much more recently and with much more success; a 



136 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

campaign against the Jews like one of the Anti-Semitic 
campaigns of the Continent. Now any one who knows 
anything of America knows exactly what the Peace Ship 
would be like. It was a national combination of imag- 
ination and ignorance, which has at least some of the 
beauty of innocence. Men living in those huge hedge- 
less inland plains know nothing about frontiers or the 
tragedy of a fight for freedom; they know nothing of 
alarum and armament or the peril of a high civilisation 
poised like a precious statue within reach of a mailed 
fist. They are accustomed to a cosmopolitan citizenship, 
in which men of all bloods mingle and in which men of 
all creeds are counted equal. Their highest moral boast 
is humanitarianism ; their highest mental boast is enlight- 
enment. In a word, they are the very last men in the 
world who would seem likely to pride themselves on a 
prejudice against the Jews. They have no religion in 
particular, except a sincere sentiment which they would 
call 'true Christianity,' and which specially forbids an. 
attack on the Jews. They have a patriotism which 
prides itself on assimilating all types, including the Jews. 
Mr. Ford is a pure product of this pacific world, as was 
sufficiently proved by his pacifism. If a man of that sort 
has discovered that there is a Jewish problem, it is be- 
cause there is a Jewish problem. It is certainly not be- 
cause there is an Anti- Jewish prejudice. For if there 
had been any amount of such racial and religious preju- 
dice, he would have been about the very last sort of man 
to have it. His particular part of the world would have 
been the very last place to produce it. We may well 
laugh at the Peace Ship, and its wild course and inevi- 
table shipwreck; but remember that its very wildness 
was an attempt to sail as far as possible from the castle 



PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 137 

of Front-de-Boeuf. Everything that made him Anti- 
War should have prevented him from being Anti-Semite. 
We may mock him for being mad on peace ; but we can- 
not say that he was so mad on peace that he made war 
on Israel. 

It happened that, when I was in America, I had jiist 
published some studies on Palestine; and I was besieged 
by Rabbis lamenting my 'prejudice.' I pointed out that 
they would have got hold of the wrong word, even if 
they had not got hold of the wrong man. As a point 
of personal autobiography, I do not happen to be a man 
who dislikes Jews; though I believe that some men do. 
I have had Jews among my most intimate and faithful 
friends since my boyhood, and I hope to have them till I 
die. But even if I did have a dislike of Jews, it would be 
illogical to call that dislike a prejudice. Prejudice is a 
very lucid Latin word meaning the bias which a man has 
before he considers a case. I might be said to be prej- 
udiced against a Hairy Ainu because of his name, for 
I have never been on terms of such intimacy with him 
as to correct my preconceptions. But if after moving 
about in the modern world and meeting Jews, knowing 
about Jews, I came to the conclusion that I did not like 
Jews, my conclusion certainly would not be a prejudice. 
It would simply be an opinion ; and one I should be per- 
fectly entitled to hold; though as a matter of fact I do 
not hold it. No extravagance of hatred merely follow- 
ing on experience of Jews can properly be called a prej- 
udice. 

Now the point is that this new American Anti-Semit- 
ism springs from experience and nothing but experience. 
There is no prejudice for it to spring from. Or rather 
the prejudice is all the other way. All the traditions of 



138 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

that democracy, and very creditable traditions too, are 
in favour of toleration and a sort of idealistic indiffer- 
ence. The sympathies in which these nineteenth-century 
people were reared were all against Front-de-Boeuf and 
in favour of Rebecca. They inherited a prejudice 
against Anti-Semitism ; a prejudice of Anti- Anti-Sem- 
itism. These people of the plains have found the Jewish 
problem exactly as they might have struck oil; because 
it is there, and not even because they were looking for it. 
Their view of the problem, like their use of the oil, is 
not always satisfactory; and with parts of it I entirely 
disagree. But the point is that the thing which I call a 
problem, and others call a prejudice, has now appeared 
in broad daylight in a new country where there is no 
priestcraft, no feudalism, no ancient superstition to ex- 
plain it. It has appeared because it is a problem; and 
those are the best friends of the Jews, including many 
of the Jews themselves, who are trying to find a solution. 
That is the meaning of the incident of Mr. Henry Ford 
of Detroit ; and you will hardly hear an intelligible word 
about it in England. 

The talk of prejudice against the Japs is not unlike 
the talk of prejudice against the Jews. Only in this case 
our indifference has really the excuse of ignorance. We 
used to lecture the Russians for oppressing the Jews, 
before we heard the word Bolshevist and began to lecture 
them for being oppressed by the Jews. In the same way 
we have long lectured the Calif ornians for oppressing 
the Japs, without allowing for the possibility of their 
foreseeing that the oppression may soon be the other way. 
As in the other case, it may be a persecution but it is 
not a prejudice. The CaHf ornians know more about the 
Japanese than we do; and our own colonists when they 



PRESIDENTS AND PROBLEMS 139 

are placed in the same position generally say the same 
thing. I will not attempt to deal adequately here with 
the vast international and diplomatic problems which 
arise with the name of the new power in the Far East. 
It is possible that Japan, having imitated European mili- 
tarism, may imitate European pacificism. I cannot hon- 
estly pretend to know what the Japanese mean by the one 
any more than by the other. But when Englishmen, espe- 
cially English Liberals like myself, take a superior 
and censorious attitude towards Americans and espe- 
cially Calif ornians, I am moved to make a final remark. 
When a considerable number of Englishmen talk of the 
grave contending claims of our friendship with Japan 
and our friendship with America, when they finally tend 
in a sort of summing up to dwell on the superior virtues 
of Japan, I may be permitted to make a single comment. 
We are perpetually boring the world and each other 
with talk about the bonds that bind us to America. We 
are perpetually crying aloud that England and America 
are very much alike, especially England. We are always 
insisting that the two are identical in all the things in. 
which they most obviously differ. We are always saying 
that both stand for democracy, when we should not con- 
sent to. stand for their democracy for half a day. We are 
always saying that at least we are all Anglo-Saxons, when 
we are descended from Romans and Normans and Brit- 
ons and Danes, and they are descended from Irishmen 
and Italians and Slavs and Germans. We tell a people 
whose very existence is a revolt against the British 
Crown that they are passionately devoted to the British 
Constitution. We tell a nation whose whole policy has 
been isolation and independence that with us she can bear 
safely the White Man's Burden of the universal empire. 



I40 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

We tell a continent crowded with Irishmen to thank God 
that the Saxon can always rule the Celt. We tell a popu- 
lace whose very virtues are lawless that together we up- 
hold the Reign of Law. We recognise our own law- 
abiding character in people who make laws that neither 
they nor anybody else can abide. We congratulate them 
on clinging to all they have cast away, and on imitating 
everything which they came into existence to insult. 
And when we have established all these nonsensical anal- 
ogies with a non-existent nation, we wait until there is 
a crisis in which we really are at one with America, and 
then we falter and threaten to fail her. In a battle where 
we really are of one blood, the blood of the great white 
race throughout the world, when we really have one lan- 
guage, the fundamental alphabet of Cadmus and the 
script of Rome, when we really do represent the same 
reign of law, the common conscience of Christendom and 
the morals of men baptized, when we really have an im- 
pHcit faith and honour and type of freedom to summon 
up our souls as with trumpets — then many of. us begin 
to weaken and waver and wonder whether there is not 
something very nice about little yellow men, whose 
heroic legends revolved round polygamy and suicide, and 
whose heroes wore two swords and worshipped the an- 
cestors: of the Mikado* 



PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 

I WENT to- America with some notion of not discuss- 
ing Prohibition. But I soon found that well-to-do 
Americans were only too delighted* to discuss it over 
the nuts and wine. They were even willing, if necessary, 
to dispense with- the nuts. I am far from sneering at 
this ; having a general philosophy which need not here be 
expounded, but which may be symbolised by saying that 
monkeys can enjoy nuts but only men can enjoy wine. 
But if I am to deal with Prohibition, there is no doubt of 
the first thing to be said about it. The first thing to be 
said about it is that it does not exist. It is to some extent 
enforced among the poor ; at any rate it was intended to 
be enforced among the poor; though even among them I 
fancy it is much evaded. It is certainly not enforced 
among the rich; and I doubt whether it was intended to 
be. I suspect that this has always happened whenever 
this negative notion has taken hold of some particular 
province or tribe. Prohibition never prohibits. It never 
has in history ; not even in Moslem history ; and it never 
will. Mahomet at least had the argument of a climate 
and not the interest of a class. But if a test is needed, 
consider what part of Moslem culture has passed per- 
manently into our own modern culture. You will find 
the one Moslem poem that has really pierced is a Moslem 
poem in praise of wine. The crown of all the victories 
of the Crescent is that nobody reads the Koran and every- 
body reads the Rubaiyat. 

141 



142 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

Most of us remember with satisfaction an old picture 
in Punch, representing a festive old gentleman in a state 
of collapse on the pavement, and a philanthropic old lady 
anxiously calling the attention of a cabman to the calam- 
ity. The old lady says, T'm sure this poor gentleman is 
ill,' and the cabman replies with fervour, TU! I wish I 
'ad 'alf 'is complaint.' 

We talk about unconscious humour; but there is such 
a thing as unconscious seriousness. Flippancy is a 
flower whose roots are often underground in the sub- 
consciousness. Many a man talks sense when he thinks 
he is talking nonsense; touches on a conflict of ideas as 
if it were only a contradiction of language, or really 
makes a parallel when he means only to make a pun. 
Some of the Punch jokes of the best period are examples 
of this; and that quoted above is a very strong example 
of it. The cabman meant what he said; but he said a 
great deal more than he meant. His utterance contained 
fine philosophical doctrines and distinctions of which he 
was not perhaps entirely conscious. The spirit of the 
English language, the tragedy and comedy of the con- 
dition of the English people, spoke through him as the 
god spoke through a teraph-head or brazen mask of 
oracle. And the oracle is an omen; and in some sense 
an omen of doom. 

Observe, to begin with, the sobriety of the cabman. 
Note his measure, his moderation ; or to use the yet truer 
term, his temperance. He only wishes to have half the 
old gentleman's complaint. The old gentleman is wel- 
come to the other half, along with all the other pomps and 
luxuries of his superior social station. There is nothing 
Bolshevist or even Communist about the temperance cab- 
man. He might almost be called Distributist, in the sense 



PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 143 

that he wishes to distribute the old gentleman's complaint 
more equally between the old gentleman and himself. 
And, of course, the social relations there represented are 
very much truer to life than it is fashionable to suggest. 
By the realism of this picture Mr. Punch made amends 
for some more snobbish pictures, with the opposite social 
moral. It will remain eternally among his real glories 
that he exhibited a picture in which a cabman was sober 
and the gentleman was drunk. Despite many ideas to 
the contrary, it was emphatically a picture of real life. 
The truth is subject to the simplest of all possible tests. 
If the cabman were really and truly drunk he would not 
be a cabman, for he could not drive a cab. If he had 
the whole of the old gentleman's complaint, he would be 
sitting happily on the pavement beside the old gentleman ; 
a symbol of social equality found at last, and the levelling 
of all classes of mankind. I do not say that there has 
never been such a monster known as a dru'nken cabman ; 
I do not say that the driver may not sometimes have 
approximated imprudently to three-quarters of the com- 
plaint, instead of adhering to his severe but wise concep- 
tion of half of it. But I do say that most men of the 
world, if they spoke sincerely, oould testify to more ex- 
amples of helplessly drunken gentlemen put inside of cabs 
than of helplessly drunken drivers on top of them. Phil- 
anthropists and officials, who never look -at people but only 
at papers, probably have a mass of social statistics to the 
contrary ; founded on the simple fact that cabmen can be 
cross-examined about their habits and gentlemen cannot. 
Social workers probably have the whole thing worked 
out in sections and compartments, showing how the ex- 
treme intoxication of cabmen compares with the parallel 
intoxication of costermongers ; or measuring the drunken- 



144 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

ness of a dustman against the drunkenness of a crossing- 
sweeper. But there is more practical experience embod- 
ied in the practical speech of the English; and in the pro- 
verb that says *as drunk as a lord/ 

Now Prohibition, whether as a proposal in England 
or a pretence in America, simply means that the man who 
has drunk less shall have no drink, and the man who has 
drunk more shall have all the drink. It means that the 
old gentleman shall be carried home in a cab drunker than 
ever ; but that, in order to make it quite safe for him to 
drink to excess, the man who drives him shall be for- 
bidden to drink even in moderation. That is what it 
means ; that is all it means ; that is all it ever will mean. 
It means that often in Islam; where the luxurious and 
advanced drink champagne, while the poor and fanatical 
drink water. It means that in modern America; where 
the wealthy are all at this moment sipping their cocktails, 
and discussing how much harder labourers can be made 
to work if only they can be kept from festivity. This 
is what it means and all it means; and men are divided 
about it according to whether they believe in a certain 
transcendental concept called 'justice,' expressed in a 
more mystical paradox as the equality of men. So 
long as you do not believe in justice, and so long as 
you are rich and really confident of remaining so, 
you can have Prohibition and be as drunk as you 
choose. 

I see that some remarks by the Rev. R. J. Campbell, 
dealing with social conditions in America, are reported 
in the press. They include some observations about Sinn 
Fein in which, as in most of Mr. Campbell's allusions to 
Ireland, it is not difficult to detect his dismal origin, or 
the acrid smell of the smoke of Belfast. But the re- 



PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 145 

marks about America are valuable in the objective sense, 
over and above their philosophy. He believes that Pro- 
hibition will survive and be a success, nor does he seem 
himself to regard the prospect with any special disfavour. 
But he frankly and freely testifies to the truth I have 
asserted; that Prohibition does not prohibit, so far as 
the wealthy are concerned. He testifies to constantly see- 
ing wine on the table, as will any other grateful guest of 
the generous hospitality of America; and he implies 
humorously that he asked no questions about the story 
told him of the old stocks in -the cellars. So there is no 
dispute about the facts; and we come back as before to 
the principles. Is Mr. Campbell content with a Prohibi- 
tion which is another name for Privilege? If so, he has 
simply absorbed along with his new theology a new 
morality which is different from mine. But he does state 
both sides of the inequality with equal logic and clearness ; 
and in these days of intellectual fog that alone is like a 
ray of sunshine. 

Now my primary objection to Prohibition is not based 
on any arguments against it, but on the one argument for 
it. I need nothing more for its condemnation than the 
only thing that is said in its defence. It is said by cap- 
italists all over America; and it is very clearly and cor- 
rectly reported by Mr. Campbell himself. The argument 
is that employees work harder, and therefore employers 
get richer. That this idea should be taken calmly, by 
itself, as the test or a problem of liberty, is in itself a 
(final testimony to the presence of slavery. It shows 
that people have completely forgotten that there is any 
other test except the servile test. Employers are wiUing 
that workmen should have exercise, as it may help them 
to do more work. They are even willing that workmen 



146 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

should have leisure; for the more intelligent capitalists 
can see that this also really means that they can do more 
work. But they are not in any way willing that workmen 
should have fun; for fun only increases the happiness 
and not the utility of the worker. Fun is freedom; and 
in that sense is an end in itself. It concerns the man 
not as a worker but as a citizen, or even as a soul ; and 
the soul in that sense is an end in itself. That a man 
shall have a reasonable amount of comedy and poetry and 
even fantasy in his life is part of his spiritual health, 
which is for the service of God; and not merely for his 
mechanical health, which is now bound to the service of 
man. The' very test adopted has all the servile implica- 
tion; the test of what we can get out of him, instead of 
the test of what he can get out of life. 

Mr. Campbell is reported to have suggested, doubt- 
less rather as a conjecture than a* prophecy, that England 
may find it necessary to become teetotal in order to 
compete commercially with the efficiency and economy 
of teetotal America. Well, in the eighteenth and early 
nineteenth centuries there was in America one of the 
most economical and efficient of all forms of labour. It 
did not happen to be feasible for the English to compete 
with it by copying it. There were so many humanitarian 
prejudices about in those days. But economically there 
seems to be no reason why a man should not have proph- 
esied that England would be forced to adopt American 
Slavery then, as she is urged to adopt American Pro- 
hibition now. Perhaps such a prophet would have proph- 
esied rightly. Certainly it is not impossible that uni- 
versal Slavery might have been the vision of Calhoun 
as universal Prohibition seems to be the vision of Camp- 
bell. The old England of 1830 would have said that 



PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 147 

such a plea for Slavery was monstrous ; but what would 
it have said of a plea for enforced water-drinking? 
Nevertheless, the nobler Servile State of Calhoun col- 
lapsed before it could spread to Europe. And there is 
always the hope that the same may happen to the far 
more materialistic Utopia of Mr. Campbell and Soft 
Drinks. 

Abstract morality is very important; and it may well 
clear the mind to consider what would be the effect of 
Prohibition in America if it were introduced there. It 
would, of course, be a decisive departure from the tradi- 
tion of the Declaration of Independence. Those who 
deny that are hardly serious enough to demand attention. 
It is enough to say that they are reduced to minimising 
that document in defence of Prohibition, exactly as the 
slave-owners were reduced to minimising it in defence 
of Slavery. They are reduced to saying that the Fathers 
of the Republic meant no more than that they would not 
be ruled by a king. And they are obviously open to the 
reply which Lincoln gave to Douglas on the slavery ques- 
tion; that if that great charter was limited to certain 
events in the eighteenth century, it was hardly worth 
making such a fuss about in the nineteenth — or in the 
twentieth. But they are also open to another reply which 
is even more to the point, when they pretend that Jeffer- 
son's famous preamble only means to say that monarchy 
is wrong. They are maintaining that Jefferson only 
meant to say something that he does not say at all. The 
great preamble does not say that all monarchical govern- 
ment must be wrong; on the contrary, it rather implies 
that most government is right. It speaks of human 
governments in general as justified by the necessity of de- 
fending certain personal rights. I see no reason what- 



148 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

ever to suppose that it would not include any royal 
government that does defend those rights. Still less do 
I doubt what it would say of a republican government 
that does destroy those rights. 

But what are those rights? Sophists can always de- 
bate about their degree; but even sophists cannot debate 
about their direction. Nobody in his five wits will deny 
that Jeffersonian democracy wished to give the law a 
general control in more public things, but the citizens a 
more general liberty in private things. Wherever we 
draw the line, liberty can only be personal liberty; and 
the most personal liberties must at least be the last liber- 
ties we lose. But to-day they are the first liberties we 
lose. It is not a question of drawing the line in the right 
place, but of beginning at the wrong end. What are the 
rights of man, if they do not include the normal right 
to regulate his own health, in relation to the normal risks 
of diet and daily life? Nobody can pretend that beer is 
a poison as prussic acid is a poison; that all the millions 
of civilized men who drank it all fell down dead when 
they had touched it. Its use and abuse is obviously a 
matter of judgment ; and there can be no personal liberty, 
if it is not a matter of private judgment. It is not in 
the least a question of drawing the line between liberty 
and licence. If this is licence, there is no such thing as 
liberty. It is plainly impossible to find any right more 
individual or intimate. To say that a man has a 
right to a vote, but not a right to a voice about the choice 
of his dinner, is like saying that he has a right to his 
hat but not a right to his head. 

Prohibition, therefore, plainly violates the rights of 
man, if there are any rights of man. What its suppor- 
ters really mean is that there are none. And in sug- 



PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 149 

gesting this, they have all the advantages that every scep- 
tic has when he supports a negation. That sort of ulti- 
mate scepticism can only be retorted upon itself, and we 
can point out to them that they can no more prove the 
right of the city to be oppressive than we can prove the 
right of the citizen to be free. In the primary meta- 
physics of such a claim, it would surely be easier to make 
it out for a single conscious soul than for an artificial 
social combination. If there are no rights of men, what 
are the rights of nations? Perhaps a nation has no 
claim to self-government. Perhaps it has no claim to 
good government. Perhaps it has no claim to any sort 
of government or any sort of independence. Perhaps 
they will say that is not implied in the Declaration of 
Independence. But without going deep into my reasons 
for believing in natural rights, or rather in supernatural 
rights (and Jefferson certainly states them as super- 
natural), I am content here to note that a man's treat- 
ment of his own body, in relation to tradition and or- 
dinary opportunities for bodily excess, is as near to his 
self-respect as social coercion can possibly go; and that 
when that is gone there is nothing left. If coercion 
applies to that, it applies to everything ; and in the future 
of this controversy it obviously will apply to everything. 
iWhen I was in America, people were already applying it 
to tobacco. I never can see why they should not apply 
it to talking. Talking often goes with tobacco as it goes 
with beer; and what is more relevant, talking may often 
lead both to beer and tobacco. Talking often drives a 
man to drink, both negatively in the form of nagging 
and positively in the form of bad company. If the 
American Puritan is so anxious to be a censor morum, he 
should obviously put a stop to the evil communications 



I50 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

that really corrupt good manners. He should reintro- 
duce the Scold's Bridle among the other Blue Laws for 
a land of blue devils. He should gag all gay deceivers 
and plausible cynics; he should cut off all flattering lips 
and the tongue that speaketh proud things. Nobody can 
doubt that nine-tenths of the harm in the world is done 
simply by talking. Jefferson and the old democrats 
allowed people to talk, not because they were unaware 
of this fact, but because they were fettered by this old 
fancy of theirs about freedom and the rights of man. 
But since we have already abandoned that doctrine in a 
final fashion, I cannot see why the new principle should 
not be applied intelligently; and in that case it would be 
applied to the control of conversation. The State would 
provide us with forms already filled up with the subjects 
suitable for us to discuss at breakfast; perhaps allowing 
us a limited number of epigrams each. Perhaps we 
should have to make a formal application in writing, to 
be allowed to make a joke that had just occurred to us in 
conversation. And the committee would consider it in 
due course. Perhaps it would be effected in a more 
practical fashion, and the private citizens would be shut 
up as the public-houses were shut up. Perhaps they 
would all wear gags, which the policeman would remove 
at stated hours ; and their mouths would be opened from 
one to three, as now in England even the public-houses 
are from time to time accessible to the public. To some 
this will sound fantastic ; but not so fantastic as Jefferson 
would have thought Prohibition. But there is one sense 
in which it is indeed fantastic, for by hypothesis it leaves 
out the favouritism that is the fundamental of the whole 
matter. The only sense in which we can say that logic 
will never go so far as this is that logic will never go the 



PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 151 

length of equality. It is perfectly possible that the same 
forces that have forbidden beer may go on to forbid 
tobacco. But they will in a special and limited sense 
forbid tobacco — but not cigars. Or at any rate not ex- 
pensive cigars. In America, where large numbers of 
ordinary men smoke rather ordinary cigars, there would 
be doubtless a good opportunity of penalising a very 
ordinary pleasure. But the Havanas of the millionaire 
will be all right. So it will be if ever the Puritans bring 
back the Scold's Bridle and the statutory silence of the 
populace. It will only be the populace that is silent. 
The politicians will go on talking. 

These I believe to be the broad facts of the problem 
of Prohibition; but it would not be fair to leave it with- 
out mentioning two other causes which, if not defences, 
are at least excuses. The first is that Prohibition was 
largely passed in a sort of fervour or fever of self-sacri- 
fice, which was a part of the passionate patriotism of 
America in the war. As I have remarked elsewhere, 
those who have any notion of what that national una- 
nimity was like will smile when they see America made a 
model of mere international idealism. Prohibition was 
partly a sort of patriotic renunciation; for the popular 
instinct, like every poetic instinct, always tends at great 
crises to great gestures of renunciation. But this very 
fact, while it makes the inhumanity far more human, 
makes it far less final and convincing. Men cannot re- 
main standing stififly in such symbolical attitudes ; nor can 
a permanent policy be founded on something analogous 
to flinging a gauntlet or uttering a battle-cry. We might 
as well expect all the Yale students to remain through 
life with their mouths open, exactly as they were when 
they uttered the college yell. It would be as reasonable 



152 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

as to expect them to remain through Hfe with their 
mouths shut, while the wine-cup which has been the sac- 
rament of all poets and lovers passed round among all the 
youth of the world. This point appeared very plainly 
in a discussion I had with a very thoughtful and sympa- 
thetic American critic, a clergyman writing in an Anglo- 
Catholic magazine. He put the sentiment of these 
healthier Prohibitionists, which had so much to do with 
the passing of Prohibition, by asking, *May not a man 
who is asked to give up his blood for his country be 
asked to give up his beer for his country?' And this 
phrase clearly illuminates all the limitations of the case. 
I have never denied, in principle, that it might in some 
abnormal crisis be lawful for a government to lock up the 
beer; or to lock up the bread. In that sense I am quite 
prepared to treat the sacrifice of beer in the same way as 
the sacrifice of blood. But is my American critic really 
ready to treat the sacrifice of blood in the same way as 
the sacrifice of beer? Is bloodshed to be as prolonged 
and protracted as Prohibition? Is the normal non-com- 
batant to shed his gore as often as he misses his drink? 
I can imagine people submitting to a special regulation, 
as I can imagine them serving in a particular war. I do 
indeed despise the political knavery that deliberately 
passes drink regulations as war measures and then pre- 
serves them as peace measures. But that is not a ques- 
tion of whether drink and drunkenness are wrong, but 
of whether lying and swindling are wrong. But I never 
denied that there might need to be exceptional sacrifices 
for exceptional occasions ; and war is in its nature an ex- 
ception. Only, if war is the exception, why should Pro- 
hibition be the rule? If the surrender of beer is worthy 
to be compared to the shedding of blood, why then blood 



PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 153 

ought to be flowing for ever like a fountain in the public 
squares of Philadelphia and New York. If my critic 
wants to complete his parallel, he must draw up rather a 
a remarkable programme for the daily life of the ordi- 
nary citizens. He must suppose that, through all their 
lives, they are paraded every day at lunch time and prod- 
ded with bayonets to show that they will shed their blood 
for their country. He must suppose that every evening, 
after a light repast of poison gas and shrapnel, they are 
made to go to sleep in a trench under a permanent drizzle 
of shell-fire. It is surely obvious that if this were the 
normal life of the citizen, the citizen would have no nor- 
mal life. The common sense of the thing is that sacri- 
fices of this sort are admirable but abnormal. It is not 
normal for the State to be perpetually regulating our 
days with the discipline of a fighting regiment ; and it is 
not normal for the State to be perpetually regulating our 
diet with the discipline of a famine. To say that every 
citizen must be subject to control in such bodily things is 
like saying that every Christian ought to tear himself 
with red-hot pincers because the Christian martyrs did 
their duty in time of persecution. A man has a right to 
control his body, though in a time of martyrdom he may 
give his body to be burned; and a man has a right to 
control his bodily health, though in a state of siege he 
may give his body to be starved. Thus, though the pa- 
triotic defence was a sincere defence, it is a defence that 
conies back on the defenders like a boomerang. For it 
proves only that Prohibition ought to be ephemeral, un- 
less war ought to be eternal. 

The other excuse is much less romantic and much 
more realistic. I have already said enough of the cause 
which is really realistic. The real power behind Prohibi- 



154 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

tion is simply the plutocratic power of the pushing em- 
ployers who wish to get the last inch of work out of their 
workmen. But before the progress of modern plutocracy 
had reached this stage, there was a predetermining cause 
for which there was a much better case. The whole busi- 
ness began with the problem of black labour. I have not 
attempted in this book to deal adequately with the ques- 
tion of the negro. I have refrained for a reason that 
may seem somewhat sensational; that I do not think I 
have anything particularly valuable to say or suggest. 
I do not profess to understand this singularly dark and 
intricate matter; and I see no use in men who have no 
solution filling up the gap with sentimentalism. The 
chief thing that struck me about the coloured people I 
saw was their charming and astonishing cheerfulness. 
My sense of pathos was appealed to much more by the 
Red Indians ; and indeed I wish I had more space here to 
do justice to the Red Indians. They did heroic service 
in the war; and more than justified their glorious place 
in the day-dreams and nightmares of our boyhood. But 
the negro problem certainly demands more study than a 
sight-seer could give it; and this book is controversial 
enough about things that I have really considered, with- 
out permitting it to exhibit me as a sight-seer who shoots 
at sight. But I believe that it was always common 
ground to people of common sense that the enslavement 
and importation of negroes had been the crime and ca- 
tastrophe of American history. The only difference was 
originally that one side thought that, the crime once com- 
mitted, the only reparation was their freedom ; while the 
other thought that, the crime once committed, the only 
safety was their slavery. It was only comparatively 
lately, by a process I shall have to indicate elsewhere, 



PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 155 

that anything Hke a positive case for slavery became pos- 
sible. Now among the many problems of the presence 
of an alien and at least recently barbaric figure among 
the citizens, there was a very real problem of drink. 
Drink certainly has a very exceptionally destructive effect 
upon negroes in their native countries ; and it was alleged 
to have a peculiarly demoralising effect upon negroes in 
the United States; to call up the passions that are the 
particular temptation of the race and to lead to appalling 
outrages that are followed by appalling popular vengeance. 
However this may be, many of the states of the Ameri- 
can Union, which first forbade liquor to citizens, meant 
simply to forbid it to negroes. But they had not the 
moral courage to deny that negroes are citizens. About 
all their political expedients necessarily hung the load 
that hangs on so much of modem politics : hypocrisy. 
The superior race had to rule by a sort of secret society 
organised against the inferior. The American politicians 
dared not disfranchise the negroes ; so they coerced every- 
body in theory and only the negroes in practice. The 
drinking of the white men became as much a conspiracy 
as the shooting by the white horsemen of the Ku-Klux- 
Klan. And in that connection, it may be remarked in 
passing that the comparison illustrates the idiocy of sup- 
posing that the moral sense of mankind will ever support 
the prohibition of drinking as if it were something like 
the prohibition of shooting. Shooting in America is 
liable to take a free form, and sometimes a very horrible 
form ; as when private bravos were hired to kill workmen 
in the capitalistic interests of that pure patron of disar- 
mament, Carnegie. But when some of the rich Ameri- 
cans gravely tell us that their drinking cannot be interfered 
with, because they are only using up their existing stocks 



156 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

of wine, we may well be disposed to smile. When I was 
there, at any rate, they were using them up very fast; 
and with no apparent fears about the supply. But if 
the Ku-Klux-Klan had started suddenly shooting every- 
body they didn't like in broad daylight, and had blandly 
explained that they were only using up the stocks of their 
ammunition, left over from the Civil War, it seems prob- 
able that there would at least have been a little curiosity 
about how much they had left. There might at least 
have been occasional inquiries about how long it was 
likely to go on. It is even conceivable that some steps 
might have been taken to stop it. 

No steps are taken to stop the drinking of the rich, 
chiefly because the rich now make all the rules and there- 
fore all the exceptions, but partly because nobody ever 
could feel the full moral seriousness of this particular 
rule. And the truth is, as I have indicated, that it was 
originally established as an exception and not as a rule. 
The emancipated negro was an exception in the commu- 
nity, and a certain plan was, rightly or wrongly, adopted 
to meet his case. A law was made professedly for every- 
body and practically only for him. Prohibition is only 
important as marking the transition by which the trick, 
tried successfully on black labour, could be extended to 
all labour. We in England have no right to be Phari- 
saic at the expense of the Americans in this matter; for 
we have tried the same trick in a hundred forms. The 
true philosophical defence of the modern oppression of 
the poor would be to say frankly that we have ruled 
them so badly that they are unfit to rule themselves. 
But no modern oligarch is enough of a man to say this. 

For like all virile cynicism it would have an element 
of humility; which would not mix with the necessary 



PROHIBITION IN FACT AND FANCY 157 

element of hypocrisy. So we proceed, just as the Ameri- 
cans do, to make a law for everybody and then evade 
it for ourselves. We have not the honesty to say that 
the rich may bet because they can afford it ; so we forbid 
any man to bet in any place ; and then say that a place is 
not a place. It is exactly as if there were an American 
law allowing a negro to be murdered because he is not a 
man within the meaning of the Act. We have not the 
honesty to drive the poor to school because they are ignor- 
ant ; so we pretend to drive everybody ; and then send in- 
spectors to the slums but not to the smart streets. We 
apply the same ingenuous principle; and are quite as un- 
democratic as Western democracy. Nevertheless there is 
an element in the American case which cannot be present 
in ours ; and this chapter may well conclude upon so im- 
portant a change. 

America can now say with pride that she has abolished 
the colour bar. In this matter the white labourer and the 
black labourer have at last been put upon an equal social 
footing. White labour is every bit as much enslaved as 
black labour ; and is actually enslaved by a method and a 
model only intended for black labour. We might think 
it rather odd if the exact regulations about flogging ne- 
groes were reproduced as a plan for punishing strikers; 
or if industrial arbitration issued its reports in the precise 
terminology of the Fugitive Slave Law. But this is in 
essentials what has happened ; and one could almost fancy 
some negro orgy of triumph, with the beating of gongs 
and all the secret violence of Voodoo, crying aloud to 
some ancestral Mumbo Jumbo that the Poor White Trash 
was being treated according to its name. 



FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 

A FOREIGNER is a man who laughs at every- 
thing except jokes. He is perfectly entitled 
to laugh at anything, so long as he realises, in 
a reverent and religious spirit, that he himself is laughable. 
I was a foreigner in America ; and I can truly claim that 
the sense of my own laughable position never left me. 
But when the native and the foreign have finished with 
seeing the fun of each other in things that are meant to be 
serious, they both approach the far more delicate and dan- 
gerous ground of things that are meant to be funny. The 
sense of humour is generally very national; perhaps that 
is why the internationalists are so careful to purge them- 
selves of it. I had occasion during the war to consider 
the rights and wrongs of certain differences alleged to 
have arisen between the English and American soldiers 
at the front. And, rightly or wrongly, I came to the 
conclusion that they arose from the failure to understand 
when a foreigner is serious and when he is humorous. 
And it is in the very nature of the best sort of joke to be 
the worst sort of insult if it is not taken as a joke. 

The English and the American types of humour are in 
one way directly contrary. The most American sort of 
fun involves a soaring imagination, piling one house on 
another in a tower like that of a sky-scraper. The most 
English humour consists of a sort of bathos, of a man 
returning to the earth his mother in a homely fashion ; as 
when he sits down suddenly on a butter-slide. English 
farce describes a man as being in a hole. American fan- 

168 



FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 159 

tasy, in its more aspiring spirit, describes a man as being 
up a tree. The former is to be found in the cockney 
comic songs that concern themselves with hanging out the 
washing or coming home with tlie milk. The latter is to 
be found in those fantastic yarns about machines that turn 
live pigs into pig-skin purses or burning cities that serve to 
hatch an egg. But it will be inevitable, when the two 
come first into contact, that the bathos will sound like vul- 
garity and the extravagance will sound like boasting. 

Suppose an American soldier said to an English soldier 
in the trenches, 'The Kaiser may want a place in the sun ; 
I reckon he won't have a place in the solar system when 
we begin to hustle.' The English soldier will very probably 
form the impression that this is arrogance ; an impression 
based on the extraordinary assumption that the American 
means what he says. The American has merely indulged 
in a little art for art's sake, an abstract adventure of the 
imagination; he has told an American short story. But 
the Englishman, not understanding this, will think the 
other man is boasting, and reflecting on the insufficiency 
of the English effort. The English soldier is very likely 
to say something like, *0h, you'll be wanting to get home 
to your old woman before that, and asking for a kipper 
with your tea.' And it is quite likely that the American 
will be offended in his turn at having his arabesque of 
abstract beauty answered in so personal a fashion. Being 
an American, he will probably have a fine and chivalrous 
respect for his wife ; and may object to her being called an 
old woman. Possibly he in turn may be under the ex- 
traordinary delusion that talking of the old woman really 
means that the woman is old. Possibly he thinks the 
mysterious demand for a kipper carries with it some 
charge of ill-treating his wife; which his national sense 



i6o WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

of honour swiftly resents. But the real cross-purposes 
come from the contrary direction of the two exaggera- 
tions, the American making life more wild and impossible 
than it is, and the Englishman making it more flat and 
farcical than it is ; the one escaping the house of life by a 
skylight and the other by a trap-door. 

This difficulty of different humours is a very practical 
one for practical people. Most of those who profess to 
remove all international differences are not practical 
people. Most of the phrases offered for the reconcilia- 
tion of severally patriotic peoples are entirely serious and 
even solemn phrases. But human conversation is not 
conducted in those phrases. The normal man on nine 
occasions out of ten is rather a flippant man. And the 
normal man is almost always the national man. Patri- 
otism is the most popular of all virtues. The drier 
sort of democrats who despise it have the democracy a- 
gainst them in every country in the world. Hence their 
international efforts seldom go any farther than to effect 
an international reconciliation of all internationalists. 
But we have not solved the normal and popular problem 
until we have an international reconciliation of all nation- 
alists. 

It is very difficult to see how humour can be translated 
at all. When Sam Weller is in the Fleet Prison and Mrs. 
Weller and Mr. Stiggins sit on each side of the fireplace 
and weep and groan with sympathy, old Mr. Weller 
observes, *Vell, Samivel, I hope you'll find your spirits 
rose by this 'ere wisit.' I have never looked up this pas- 
sage in the popular and successful French version of Pick- 
wick; but I confess I am curious as to what French past- 
participle conveys the precise effect of the word Vose.' 
A translator has not only to give the right translation of 



FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION i6i 

the right word but the right translation of the wrong 
word. And in the same way I am quite prepared to sus- 
pect that there are EngHsh jokes which an EngHshman 
must enjoy in his own rich 'and romantic solitude, without 
asking for the sympathy of an American* But English- 
men are generally only too prone to claim this fine percep- 
tion, without seeing that the fine edge of it cuts both ways. 
I have begun this chapter on the note of national humour, 
because I wish to make it quite clear that I realise how 
easily a foreigner may take something seriously that is 
not serious. When I think something in America is really 
foolish, it may be I that am made a fool of. It is the 
first duty of a traveller to allow for this; but it seems to 
be the very last thing that occurs to some travellers. But 
when I seek to say something of what may be called the 
fantastic side of America, I allow beforehand that some 
of it may be meant to be fantastic. And indeed it is very 
difficult to believe that some of it is meant to be serious. 
But whether or no there is a joke, there is certainly an 
inconsistency; and it is an inconsistency in the moral 
make-up of America which both puzzles and amuses me. 
The danger of democracy is not anarchy but convention. 
There is even a sort of double meaning in the word *con- 
vention'; for it is also used for the most informal and 
popular sort of parliament ; a parliament not summoned by 
any king. The Americans come together very easily 
without any king; but their coming together is in every 
sense a convention, and even a very conventional conven- 
tion. In a democracy riot is rather the exception and 
respectability certainly the rule. And though a superficial 
sight-seer should hesitate about all such generalisations, 
and certainly should allow for enormous exceptions to 
them, he does receive a general impression of unity verg- 



i62 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

ing on uniformity. Thus Americans all dress well; one 
might almost say that American women all look well; 
but they do not, as compared with Europeans, look very 
different. They are in the fashion ; too much in the fash- 
ion even to be conspicuously fashionable. Of course 
there are patches, both Bohemian and Babylonian, of 
which this is not true, but I am talking of the general 
tone of a whole democracy. I have said there is more 
respectability than riot; but indeed in a deeper sense the 
same spirit is behind both riot and respectability. It is 
the same social force that makes it possible for the respect- 
able to boycott a man and for the riotous to lynch him. 
I do not object to it being called 'the herd instinct,' so 
long as we realise that it is a metaphor and not an explana- 
tion. 

Public opinion can be a prairie fire. It eats up every- 
thing that opposes it ; and there is the grandeur as well as 
the grave disadvantages of a natural catastrophe in that 
national unity. Pacifists who complained in England of 
the intolerance of patriotism have no notion of what pa- 
triotism can be like. If they had been in America, after 
America had entered the war, they would have seen some- 
thing which they would have always perhaps subcon- 
sciously dreaded, and would then have beyond all their 
worse dreams detested ; and the name of it is democracy. 
They would have found that there are disadvantages in 
birds of a feather flocking together; and that one of them 
follows on a too complacent display of the white feather. 
The truth is that a certain flexible sympathy with eccen- 
trics of this kind is rather one of the advantages of an 
aristocratic tradition. The imprisonment of Mr. Debs, 
the American Pacifist, which really was prolonged and 
oppressive, would probably have been shortened in Eng- 



FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 163 

land, where his opinions were shared by aristocrats like 
Mr. Bertrand Russell and Mr. Ponsonby. A man like 
Lord Hugh Cecil could be moved to the defence of con- 
scientious objectors, partly by a true instinct of chivalry; 
but partly also by the general feeling that a gentleman 
may very probably have aunts and uncles who are quite 
as mad. He takes the matter personally, in the sense of 
being able to imagine the psychology of the persons. But 
democracy is no respecter of -persons. It is no respecter 
of them, either in the bad and servile or in the good and 
sympathetic sense. And Debs was nothing to democracy. 
He was but one of the millions. This is a real problem, 
or question in the balance, touching different forms of 
government; which is, of course, quite neglected by the 
idealists who merely repeat long words. There was dur- 
ing the war a society called the Union of Democratic 
Control, which would have been instantly destroyed any- 
where democracy had any control, or where there was any 
union. And in this sense the United States have most 
emphatically got a union. Nevertheless I think there 
is something rather more subtle than this simple popular 
solidity behind the assimilation of American citizens to 
each other. There is something even in the individual 
ideals that drives towards this social sympathy. And 
it is here that we have to remember that biological fan- 
cies like the herd instinct are only figures of speech, and 
cannot really cover anything human. For the Ameri- 
cans are in some ways a very self-conscious people. To 
compare their social enthusiasm to a stampede of cattle 
is to ask us to believe in a bull writing a diary or a cow 
looking in a looking-glass. Intensely sensitive by their 
very vitality, they are certainly conscious of criticism 
and not merely of a blind and brutal appetite. But the 



i64 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

peculia,r point about them is that it is this very vividness in 
the self that often produces the similarity. It may be that 
when they are unconscious they are like bulls and cov^s. 
But it is when they are self-conscious that they are like 
each other. 

Individualism is the death of individuality. It is so, 
if only because it is an *ism.' Many Americans become 
almost impersonal in their worship of personality. 
Where their natural selves might differ, their ideal selves 
tend to be the same. Anybody can see what I mean in 
those strong self-conscious photographs of American 
business men that can be seen in any American magazine. 
Each may conceive himself to be a solitary Napoleon 
brooding at St. Helena; but the result is a multitude of 
Napoleons brooding all over the place. Each of them 
must have the eyes of a mesmerist; but the most weak- 
minded person cannot be mesmerised by more than one 
millionaire at a time. Each of the millionaires must 
thrust forward his jaw, offering (if I may say so) to fight 
the world with the same weapon as Samson. Each of 
them must accentuate the length of his chin, especially, 
of course, by always being completely clean-shaven. It 
would be obviously inconsistent with Personality to pre- 
fer to wear a beard. These are of course fantastic exam- 
ples on the fringe of American life; but they do stand for 
a certain assimilation, not through brute gregariousness, 
but rather through isolated dreaming. And though it. is 
not always carried so far as this, I do think it is carried 
too far. There is not quite enough unconsciousness to 
produce real individuality. There is a sort of worship of 
will-power in the abstract, so that people are actually 
thinking about how they can will, more than about what 
they want. To this I do think a certain corrective could 



FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 165 

be found in the nature of English eccentricity. Every 
man in his humour is most interesting when he is uncon- 
scious of his humour ; or at least when he is in an inter- 
mediate stage between humour in the old sense of oddity 
and in the new sense of irony. Much is said in these days 
against negative morality ; and certainly most Americans 
would show a positive preference for positive morality. 
The virtues they venerate collectively are very active vir- 
tues; cheerfulness and courage and vim, otherwise zip, 
also pep and similar things. But it is sometimes forgot- 
ten that negative morality is freer than positive morality. 
Negative morality is a net of a larger and more open pat- 
tern, of which the lines or cords constrict at longer inter- 
vals. A man like Dr. Johnson could grow in his own way 
to his own stature in the net of the Ten Commandments ; 
precisely because he was convinced there were only ten 
of them. He was not compressed into the mould of posi- 
tive beauty, like that of the Apollo Belvedere or the 
American citizen. 

This criticism is sometimes true even of the American 
woman, who is certainly a much more delightful person 
than the mesmeric millionaire with his shaven jaw. In- 
terviewers in the United States perpetually asked me what 
I thought of American women, and I confessed a distaste 
for such generalisations which I have not managed to lose. 
The Americans, who are the most chivalrous people in the 
world, may perhaps understand me ; but I can never help 
feeling that there is something polygamous about talking 
of women in the plural at all ; something unworthy of any 
American except a Mormon. Nevertheless, I think the 
exaggeration I suggest does extend in a less degree to 
American women, fascinating as they are. I think they 
too tend too much to this cult of impersonal personality. 



i66 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

It is a description easy to exaggerate even by the faintest 
emphasis; for all these things are subtle and subject to 
striking individual exceptions. To complain of people 
for being brave and bright and kind and intelligent may 
not unreasonably appear unpeasonable. And yet there is 
something in the background that can only be expressed by 
a symbol, something that is not shallowness but a neglect 
of the subconsciousness and the vaguer and slower im- 
pulses ; something that can be missed amid all that laughter 
and light, under those starry candelabra of the ideals of 
the happy virtues. Sometimes it came over me, in a 
wordless wave, that I should like to see a sulky woman. 
How she would walk in beauty like the night, and reveal 
more silent spaces full of older stars ! These things can- 
not be conveyed in their delicate proportion even in the 
most large and allusive terms. But the same thing was 
in the mind of a white-bearded old man I met in New 
York, an Irish exile and a wonderful talker, who stared 
up at the tower of gilded galleries of the great hotel, and 
said with that spontaneous movement of style which is 
hardly heard except from Irish talkers : 'And I have been 
in a village in the mountains where the people could 
hardly read or write; but all the men were like soldiers, 
and all the women had pride.' 

It sounds like a poem about an earthly paradise to say 
that in this land the old women can be more beautiful 
than the young. Indeed, I think Walt Whitman, the 
national poet, has a line somewhere almost precisely to 
that effect. It sounds like a parody upon Utopia, and 
the image of the lion lying down with the lamb, to say 
it is a place where a man might almost fall in love with 
his mother-in-law. But there is nothing in which the 
finer side of American gravity and good feeling does more 



FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 167 

nonourably exhibit itself than in a certain atmosphere 
around the older women. It is not a cant phrase to say 
that they grow old gracefully; for they do really grow 
old. In this the national optimism really has in it the 
national courage. The old women do not dress like 
young women; they only dress better. There is another 
side to this feminine dignity in the old, sometimes a little 
lost in the young, with which I shall deal presently. The 
point for the moment is that even Whitman's truly poetic 
vision of the beautiful old women suffers a little from 
that bewildering multiplicity and recurrence that is indeed 
the whole theme of Whitman. It is like the green eter- 
nity of Leaves of Grass. When I think of the eccentric 
spinsters and incorrigible grandmothers of my own 
country, I cannot imagine that any one of them could 
possibly be mistaken for another, even at a glance; and 
in comparison I feel as if I had been travelling in an 
earthly paradise of more decorative harmonies; and I 
remember only a vast cloud of grey and pink as of the 
plumage of cherubim in an old picture. But on second 
thoughts, I think this may be only the inevitable effect 
of visiting any country in a swift and superficial fashion; 
and that the grey and pink cloud is possibly an illusion, 
like the spinning prairies scattered by the wheel of the 
train. 

Anyhow there is enough of this equality, and of a 
certain social unity favourable to sanity, to make the 
next point about America very much of a puzzle. It 
seems to me a very real problem, to which I have never 
seen an answer even such as I shall attempt here, why a 
democracy should produce fads ; and why, where there is 
so genuine a sense of human dignity, there should be so 
much of an impossible petty tyranny. I am not refer- 



i68 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

ring solely or even specially to Prohibition, which I dis- 
cuss elsewhere. Prohibition is at least a superstition, 
and therefore next door to a religion ; it has some imag- 
inable connection with moral questions, as have slavery 
or human sacrifice. But those who ask us to model our- 
selves on the States which punish the sin of drink forget 
that there are States which punish the equally shameless 
sin of smoking a cigarette in the open air. The same 
American atmosphere that permits Prohibition permits 
of people being punished for kissing each other. In 
other words, there are States psychologically capable of 
making a man a convict for wearing a blue neck-tie or 
having a green front-door, or anything else that anybody 
chooses to fancy. There is an American atmosphere in 
which people may some day be shot for shaking hands, or 
hanged for writing a post-card. 

As for the sort of thing to which I refer, the American 
newspapers are full of it and there is no name for it but 
mere madness. Indeed it is not only mad, but it calls 
itself mad. To mention but one example out of many, 
it was actually boasted that some lunatics were teaching 
children to take care of their health. And it was 
proudly added that the children were 'heal'th-mad.' That 
it is not exactly the object of all mental hygiene to make 
people mad did not occur to them ; and they may still be 
engaged in their earnest labours to teach babies to be 
valetudinarians and hypochondriacs in order to make 
them healthy. In such cases, we may say that the mod- 
ern world is too ridiculous to* be ridiculed. You cannot 
caricature a caricature. Imagine what a satirist of 
saner days would have made of the daily life of a child 
of six, who was actually admitted to be mad on the 
subject of his own health. These are not days in which 



FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 169 

that great extravaganza could be written ; but I dimly see 
some of its episodes like uncompleted dreams. I see the 
child pausing in the middle of a cart-wheel, or when he 
has performed three-quarters of a cart-wheel, and con- 
sulting a little note-book about the amount of exercise 
per diem. I see him pausing half-way up a tree, or 
when he has climbed exactly one-third of a tree ; and then 
producing a clinical thermometer to take his own tem- 
perature. But what would be the good of imaginative 
logic to prove the madness of such people, when they 
themselves praise it for being mad ? 

There is also the cult of the Infant Phenomenon, of 
which Dickens made fun and of which educationalists 
make fusses. When I was in America another news- 
paper produced a marvellous child of six who had the 
intellect of a child of twelve. The only test given, and 
apparently one on which the experiment turned, was that 
she could be made to understand and even to employ the 
word 'annihilate.* When asked to say something prov- 
ing this, the happy infant offered the polished aphorism, 
'When common sense comes in, superstition is annihi- 
lated.' In reply to which, by way of showing that I 
also am as intelligent as a child of twelve, and there is no 
arrested development about me, I will say in the same 
elegant diction, When psychological education comes in, 
common sense is annihilated. Everybody seems to be 
sitting round this child in an adoring fashion. It did not 
seem to occur to anybody that we do not particularly 
want even a child of twelve to talk about annihilating 
superstition; that we do not want a child of six to talk 
like a child of twelve, or a child of twelve to talk like a 
man of fifty, or even a man of fifty to talk like a fool. 
And on the principle of hoping that a little girl of six 



I70 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

will have a massive and mature brain there is every 
reason for hoping that a little boy of six will grow a 
magnificent and bushy beard. 

Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up 
among American cranks. Anybody may propose to es- 
tablish coercive Eugenics; or enforce psycho-analysis^ — 
that is, enforce confession without absolution. And I 
confess I cannot connect this feature with the genuine 
democratic spirit of the mass. I can only suggest, in 
concluding this chapter, two possible causes rather 
peculiar to America, which may have made this great 
democracy so unlike all other democracies, and in this so 
manifestly hostile to the whole democratic idea. 

The first historical cause is Puritanism; but not Pur- 
itanism merely in the sense of Prohibitionism. The 
truth is that prohibitions might have done far less harm 
as prohibitions, if a vague association had not arisen, on 
some dark day of human unreason, between prohibition 
and progress. And it was the progress that did the 
harm, not the prohibition. Men can enjoy life under 
considerable limitations, if they can be sure of their 
limited enjoyments; but under Progressive Puritanism 
we can never be sure* of anything. The curse of it is not 
limitation; it is unlimited limitation. The evil is not in 
the restriction; but in the fact that nothing can ever re- 
strict the restriction. The prohibitions are bound to 
progress point by point; more and more human rights 
and pleasures must of necessity be taken away; for it is 
of the nature of this futurism that the latest fad is the 
faith of the future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably 
makes the pace. Thus the worst thing in the seventeenth- 
century aberration was not so much Puritanism as secta- 
rianism. It searched for truth not by synthesis but by 



FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 171 

subdivision. It not only broke religion into small pieces, 
but it was bound to choose the smallest piece. There is 
in America, I believe, a large religious body that has felt 
it right to separate itself from Christendom, because it 
cannot believe in the morality of wearing buttons. I do 
not know how the schism arose ; but it is easy to suppose, 
for the sake of argument, that there had originally existed 
some Puritan body which condemned the frivolity of 
ribbons though not of buttons. I was going to say of 
badges but not buttons; but on reflection I cannot bring 
myself to believe that any American, however insane, 
would object to wearing badges. But the point is that 
as the holy spirit of progressive prophesy rested on the 
first sect because it had invented a new objection to 
ribbons, so that holy spirit would then pass from it to the 
new sect who invented a further objection to buttons. 
And from them it must inevitably pass to any rebel 
among them who shall choose to rise and say that he dis- 
approves of trousers because of the existence of trouser- 
buttons. Each secession in turn must be right because 
it is recent, and progress must progress by growing 
smaller and smaller. That is the progressive theory, the 
legacy of seventeenth-century sectarianism, the dogma 
implied in much modern politics, and the evident enemy 
of democracy. Democracy is reproached with saying 
that the majority is always right. But progress says that 
the minority is always right. Progressives are prophets; 
and fortunately not all the people are prophets. Thus in 
the atmosphere of this slowly dying sectarianism anybody 
who chooses to prophesy and prohibit can tyrannise over 
the people. If he chooses to say that drinking is always 
wrong, or that kissing is always wrong, or that wearing 
buttons is always wrong, people are afraid to contradict 



172 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

him for fear they should be contradicting their own 
great-grandchild. For their superstition is an inversion 
of the ancestor-worship of China; and instead of vainly 
appealing to something that is dead, they appeal to some- 
thing that may never be born. 

There is another cause of this strange servile disease 
in American democracy. It is to be found in American 
feminism, and feminist America is an entirely different 
thing from feminine America. I should say that the 
overwhelming majority of American girls laugh at their 
female politicians at least as much as the majority of 
American men despise their male politicians. But 
though the aggressive feminists are a minority, they are 
in this atmosphere which I have tried to analyse ; the at- 
mosphere in which there is a sort of sanctity about the 
minority. And it is this superstition of seriousness that 
constitutes the most solid obstacle and exception to the 
general and almost conventional pressure of public opin- 
ion. When a fad is frankly felt to be anti-national, as 
was Abolitionism before the Civil War, or Pro-German- 
ism in the Great War, or the suggestion of radical ad- 
mixture in the South at all times, then the fad meets far 
less mercy than anywhere else in the world ; it is snowed 
imder and swept away. But when it does not thus 
directly challenge patriotism or popular ideas, a curious 
halo of hopeful solemnity surrounds it, merely because it 
is a fad, but above all if it is a feminine fad. The 
earnest lady-reformer who really utters a warning 
against the social evil of beer or buttons is seen to be 
walking clothed in light, like a prophetess. Perhaps it is 
something of the holy aureole which the East sees 
shining around an idiot. 

But I think there is another explanation, feminine 



FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 173 

rather than feminist, and proceeding from normal 
women and not from abnormal idiots. It is something 
that involves an old controversy, but one upon which I 
have not, like so many politicians, changed my opinion. 
It concerns the particular fashion in which women tend 
to regard, or rather to disregard, the formal and legal 
rights of the citizen. In so far as this is a bias, it is a 
bias in the directly opposite direction from that now 
lightly alleged. There is a sort of underbred history 
going about, according to which women in the past have 
always been in the position of slaves. It is much more 
to the point to note that women have always been in the 
position of despots. They have been despotic, because 
they ruled in an area where they had too much common 
sense to attempt to be constitutional. You cannot grant 
a constitution to a nursery; nor can babies assemble like 
barons and extort a Great Charter. Tommy cannot 
plead a Habeas Corpus against going to bed ; and an in- 
fant cannot be tried by twelve other infants before he is 
put in the comer. And as there can be no laws or lib- 
erties in a nursery, the extension of feminism means that 
there shall be no more laws or liberties in a state than 
there are in a nursery. The woman does not really re- 
gard men as citizens but as children. She may, if she 
is a humanitarian, love all mankind ; but she does not re- 
spect it. Still less does she respect its votes. Now a 
man must be very blind nowadays not to see that there is 
a danger of a sort of amateur science or pseudo-science 
being made the excuse for every trick of tyranny and 
interference. Anybody who is not an anarchist agrees 
with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but 
the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half- 
way down the chimney or even under the bed. In other 



174 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

words, it is a danger of turning the policeman into a sort 
of benevolent burglar. Against this protests are already 
being made, and will increasingly be made, if men retain 
any instinct of independence or dignity at all. But to 
complain of the woman interfering in the home will 
always sound like the complaining of the oyster intruding 
into the oyster-shell. To object that she has too much 
power over education will seem like objecting to a hen 
having too much to do with eggs. She has already been 
given an almost irresponsible power over a limited region 
in these things; and if that power is made infinite it will 
be even more irresponsible. If she adds to her own 
power in the family all these alien fads external to the 
family, her power will not only be irresponsible but 
insane. She will be something which may well be called 
a nightmare of the nursery; a mad mother. But the 
point is that she will be mad about other nurseries as 
well as her own, or possibly instead of her own. The 
results will be interesting; but at least it is certain that 
under this softening influence government of the people, 
by the people, for the people, will most assuredly perish 
from the earth. 

But there is always another possibility. Hints of it 
may be noted here and there like muffled gongs of doom. 
The other day some people preaching some low trick or 
other, for running away from the glory of mother- 
hood, were suddenly silenced in New York ; by a voice of 
deep and democratic volume. The prigs who potter 
about the great plains are pygmies dancing round a sleep- 
ing giant. That which sleeps, so far as they are con- 
cerned, is the huge power of human unanimity and intol- 
erance in the soul of America. At present the masses 
in the Middle West are indifferent to such fancies or 



FADS AND PUBLIC OPINION 175 

faintly attracted by them, as fashions of culture from the 
great cities. But any day it may not be so ; some lunatic 
may cut across their economic rights or their strange and 
buried religion ; and then he will see something. He will 
find himself running like a nigger who has wronged a 
white woman, or a man who has set the prairie on fire. 
He will see something which the politicians fan in its 
sleep and flatter with the name of the people, which many 
reactionaries have cursed with the name of the mob, but 
which in any case has had under its feet the crowns of 
many kings. It was said that the voice of the people is 
the voice of God; and this at least is certain, that it can 
be the voice of God to the wicked. And the last antics 
of their arrogance shall stiffen before something enor- 
mous, such as towers in the last words that Job heard out 
of the whirlwind ; and a voice they never knew shall tell 
them that his name is Leviathan, and he is lord over all 
the children of pride. 



THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 

WHEN I was in America I had the feeHng 
that it was far more foreign than France 
or even than Ireland. And by foreign I 
mean fascinating rather than repulsive. I mean that ele- 
ment of strangeness which markg the frontier of any 
fairyland, or gives to the traveller himself the almost 
eerie title of the stranger. And I saw there more clearly 
than in countries counted as more remote from us, in 
race or religion, a paradox that is one of the great truths 
of travel. 

We have never even begun to understand a people until 
we have found something that we do not understand. 
So long as we find the character easy to read, we are read- 
ing into it our own character. If when we see an event 
we can promptly provide an explanation, we may be 
pretty certain that we had ourselves prepared the explan- 
ation before we saw the event. It follows from this 
that the best picture of a foreign people can probably be 
found in a puzzle picture. If we can find an event of 
which the meaning is really dark to us, it will probably 
throw some light on the truth. I will therefore take 
from my American experiences one isolated incident, 
which certainly could not have happened in any other 
country I have ever clapped eyes on. I have really no 
notion of what it meant. I have heard even from 

Americans about five different conjectures about its 

176 



THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 177 

meaning. But though I do not understand it, I do sin- 
cerely believe that if I did understand it, I should under- 
stand America. 

It happened in the city of Oklahoma, which would re- 
quire a book to itself, even considered as a background. 
The State of Oklahoma is a district in the south-west 
recently reclaimed from the Red Indian territory. What 
many, quite incorrectly, imagine about all America is 
really true of Oklahoma. It is proud of having no his- 
tory. It is glowing with the sense of having a g'reat fu- 
ture — and nothing else. People are just as likely to boast 
of an old building in Nashville as in Norwich; people are 
just as proud of old families in Boston as in Bath. But 
in Oklahoma the citizens do point out a colossal struc- 
ture, arrogantly affirming that it wasn't there last week. 
It was against the colours of this crude stage scenery, as 
of a pantomime city of pasteboard, that the fantastic 
figure appeared which still haunts me like a walking note 
of interrogation. I was strolling down the main street 
of the city, and looking in at a paper-stall vivid with the 
news of crime, when a stranger addressed me; and asked 
me, quite politely but with a curious air of having author- 
ity to put the question, what I was doing in that city. 

He was a lean brown man, having rather the look of a 
shabby tropical traveller, with a grey moustache and a 
lively and alert eye. But the most singular thing about 
him was that the front of his coat was covered with a 
multitude of shining metallic emblems made i^ the shape 
of stars and crescents. I was well accustomed by this 
time to Americans adorning the lapels of their coats with 
little symbols of various societies; it is a part of the 
American passion for the ritual of comradship. There 



178 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

is nothing that an American Hkes so much as to have a 
secret society and to make no secret of it. But in this 
case, if I may put it so, the rash of symbolism seemed to 
have broken out all over the man, in a fashion that indi- 
cated that the fever was far advanced. Of this minor 
mystery, however, his first few sentences offered a pro- 
Visional explanation. In answer to his question, touch- 
ing my business in Oklahoma, I replied with restraint 
that I was lecturing. To which he replied without re- 
straint, but rather with an expansive and radiant pride, 
*I also am lecturing. I am lecturing on astronomy.' 

So far a certain wild rationality seemed to light up the 
affair. I knew it was unusual, in my own country, for 
the Astronomer Royal to walk down the Strand with 
his coat plastered all over with the Solar System. In- 
deed, it was unusual for any English astronomical lec- 
turer to advertise the subject of his lectures in this fash- 
ion. But though it would be unusual, it would not nec- 
essarily be unreasonable. In fact, I think it might add 
to the colour and variety of life, if specialists did adopt 
this sort of scientific heraldry. I should like to be able 
to recognise an entomologist at sight by the decorative 
spiders and cockroaches crawling all over his coat and 
waistcoat. I should like to see a conchologist in a simple 
costume of shells. An osteopath, I suppose, would be 
agreeably painted so as to resemble a skeleton, while a 
botanist would enliven the street with the appearance of a 
Jack-in-the-Green. So while I regarded the astronomi- 
cal lecturer in the astronomical coat as a figure dis- 
tinguishable, by a high degree of differentiation, from 
the artless astronomers of my island home (enough 
their simple loveliness for me) I saw in him nothing 
illogical, but rather an imaginative extreme of logic. 



THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 179 

And then came another turn of the wheel of topsy-turvy- 
dom, and all the logic was scattered to the wind. 

Expanding his starry bosom and standing astraddle, 
with the air of one who owned the street, the strange be- 
ing continued, 'Yes, I am lecturing on astronomy, anthro- 
pology, archaeology, palaeontology, embryology, escha- 
tology,' and so on In a thunderous roll of theoretical 
sciences apparently beyond the scope gf any single uni- 
versity, let alone any single professor. Having thus in- 
troduced himself, however, he got to business. He 
apologised with true American courtesy for having ques- 
tioned me at all, and excused it on the ground of his own 
exacting responsibilities. I imagined him to mean the 
responsibility of simultaneously occupying the chairs 
of all the faculties already mentioned. But these appar- 
ently were trifles to him, and something far more serious 
was clouding his bfow. 

*I feel it to be my duty,' he said, 'to acquaint myself 
with any stranger visiting this city; and it is an addi- 
tional pleasure to welcome here a member of the Upper 
Ten.' I assured him earnestly that I knew nothing about 
the Upper Ten, except that I did not belong to them; I 
felt, not without alarm, that the Upper Ten might be an- 
other secret society. He waved my abnegation aside 
and continued, 'I have a great responsibility in watching 
over this city. My friend the mayor and I have a great 
responsibility.' And then an extraordinary thing hap- 
pened. Suddenly diving his hand into his breast-pocket, 
he flashed something before my eyes like a hand-mirror; 
something which disappeared again almost as soon as it 
appeared. In that flash I could only see that it was some 
sort of polished metal plate, with some letters engraved 
on it like a monogram. But the reward of ^ studious 



i8o WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

and virtuous life, which has been spent chiefly in the 
reading of American detective stories, shone forth for 
me in that hour of trial; I received at last the prize of a 
profound scholarship in the matter of imaginary murders 
in tenth-rate magazines. I remembered who it was who 
in the Yankee detective yarn flashes before the eyes of 
Slim Jim or the Lone Hand Crook a badge of metal 
sometimes called a shield. Assuming all the desperate 
composure of Slim Jim himself, I replied, 'You mean 
you are connected with the police authorities here, don't 
you? Well, if I commit a murder here, I'll let you 
know.' Whereupon that astonishing man waved a hand 
in deprecation, bowed in farewell with the grace of a 
dancing master; and said, 'Oh, those are not things we 
expect from members of the Upper Ten.' 

Then that moving constellation moved away, disap- 
pearing in the dark tides of humanity, as the vision 
passed away down the dark tides from Sir Galahad and, 
starlike, mingled with the stars. 

That is the problem I would put to all Americans, and 
to all who claim to understand America. Who and what 
was that man? Was he an astronomer? Was he a de- 
tective? Was he a wandering lunatic? If he was a 
lunatic who thought he was an astronomer, why did he 
have a badge to prove he was a detective? If he was a 
detective pretending to be an astronomer, why did he tell 
a total stranger that he was a detective two minutes after 
saying he was an astronomer? If he wished to watch 
over the city in a quiet and unobtrusive fashion, why did 
he blazon himself all over with all the stars of the sky, and 
profess to give public lectures on all the subjects of the 
world? Every wise and well-conducted student of 
murder stories is acquainted with the notion of a poHce- 



THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN i8i 

man in plain clothes. But nobody could possibly say 
that this gentleman was in plain clothes. Why not wear 
his uniform, if he was resolved to show every stranger 
in the street his badge? Perhaps after all he had no uni- 
form; for these lands were but recently a wild frontier 
rudely ruled by vigilance committees. Some Americans 
suggested to me that he was the Sheriff; the regular 
hard-riding, free-shooting Sheriff of Bret Harte and my 
boyhood's dreams. Others suggested that he was an 
agent of the Ku Klux Klan, that great nameless revolu- 
tion of the revival of which there were rumours at the 
time; and that the symbol he exhibited was theirs. But 
whether he was a sheriff acting for the law, or a con- 
spirator against the law, or a lunatic entirely outside the 
law, I agree with the former conjectures upon one point. 
I am perfectly certain he had something else in his pocket 
besides a badge. And I am perfectly certain that under 
certain circumstances he would have handled it instantly, 
and shot me dead between the gay bookstall and the 
crowded trams. And that is the last touch to the com- 
plexity; for though in that country it often seems that the 
law is made by a lunatic you never know when the lunatic 
may not shoot you for keeping it. Only in the presence 
of that citizen of Oklahoma I feel I am confronted with 
the fullness and depth of the mystery of America. Be- 
cause I understand nothing, I recognise the thing that we 
call a nation; and I salute the flag. 

But even in connection with this mysterious ligure there 
is a moral which affords another reason for mentioning 
him. Whether he was a sheriff or an outlaw, there was 
certainly something about him that suggested the adven- 
turous violence of the old border life of America; and 
whether he was connected with the police or no, there 



i82 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

was certainly violence enough in his environment to sat- 
isfy the most ardent policeman. The posters in the 
paper-shop were placarded with the verdict in the Hamon 
trial ; a catise celehre which reached its crisis in Oklahoma 
while I was there. Senator Hamon had been shot by a 
girl whom he had wronged, and his widow demanded 
justice, or what might fairly be called vengeance. There 
was very great excitement culminating in the girl's ac- 
quittal. Nor did the Hamon case appear to be entirely 
exceptional in that breezy borderland. The moment the 
town had received the news that Clara Smith was free, 
newsboys rushed down the street shouting, 'Double stab- 
bing outrage near Oklahoma,' or 'Banker's throat cut on 
Main Street,' and otherwise resuming their regular mode 
of life. It seemed as much as to say, *Do not imagine that 
our local energies are exhausted in shooting a Senator,' 
or 'Come, now, the world is young, even if Clara Smith 
is acquitted, and the enthusiasm of Oklahoma is not yet 
cold.' 

But my particular reason for mentioning the matter 
is this. Despite my friend's mystical remarks about 
the Upper Ten, he lived in an atmosphere of something 
that was at least the very reverse of a respect for persons. 
Indeed, there was something in the very crudity of his 
social compliment that smacked, strangely enough, of 
that egalitarian Soil In a vaguely aristocratic country 
like England, people would never dream of telling a total 
stranger that he was a member of the Upper Ten. For 
one thing, they would be afraid that he might be. Real 
snobbishness is never vulgar; for it is intended to please 
the refined. Nobody licks the boots of a duke, if only 
because the duke does not like his boots cleaned in that 
way. Nobody embraces the knees of a marquis, because 



THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 183 

it would embarrass that nobleman. And nobody tells 
him he is a member of the Upper Ten, because every- 
body is expected to know it. But there is a much more 
subtle kind of snobbishness pervading the atmosphere 
of any society trial in England, And the first thing that 
struck me was the total absence of that atmosphere in 
the trial at Oklahoma. Mr. Hamon was presumably a 
member of the Upper Ten, if there is such a thing. He 
was a member of the Senate or Upper House in the 
American Parliament; he was a millionaire and a pillar 
of the Republican party, which might be called the re- 
spectable party; he is said to have been mentioned as a 
possible President. And the speeches of Clara Smith's 
counsel, who was known by the delightfully Oklahomite 
title of Wild Bill McLean, were wild enough in all con- 
science; but they left very little of my friend's illusion that 
members of the Upper Ten could not be accused of 
crimes. Nero and Borgia were quite presentable people 
compared with Sentor Hamon when Wild Bill McLean 
had done with him. But the difference was deeper, and 
even in a sense more delicate than this. There is a certain 
tone about English trials, which does at least begin with 
a certain scepticism about people prominent in public 
life being abominable in private life. People do vaguely 
doubt the criminality of *a man in that position*; that is, 
the position of the Marquise de Brinvilliers or the Mar- 
quis de Sade. Prima facie, it would be an advantage 
to the Marquis de Sade that he was a marquis. But it 
was certainly against Hamon that he was a millionaire. 
Wild Bill did not minimise him as a bankrupt or an ad- 
venturer; he insisted on the solidity and size of his for- 
tune, he made mountains out of the *Hamon millions,' 
as if they made the matter much worse; as indeed I think 



i84 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

they do. But that is because I happen to share a certain 
poHtical philosophy with Wild Bill and other wild buffa- 
loes of the prairies. In other words, there is really pres- 
ent here a democratic instinct against the domination of 
wealth. It does not prevent wealth from dominating; 
but it does prevent the domination from being regarded 
with any affection or loyalty. Despite the man in the 
starry coat, the Americans have not really any illusions 
about the Upper Ten. McLean was appealing to an 
implicit public opinion when he pelted the Senator with 
his gold. 

But something more is involved. I became conscious, 
as I have been conscious in reading the crime novels of 
America, that the millionaire was taken as a type and 
not an individual. This is the great difference; that 
America recognises rich crooks as a class. Any English- 
man might recognise them as individuals. Any English 
romance may turn on a crime in high life; in which the 
baronet is found to have poisoned his wife, or the elusive 
burglar turns out to be the bishop. But the English are 
not always saying, either in romance or reality, 'What's 
to be done, if our food is being poisoned by all these 
baronets ?' They do not murmur in indignation, Tf bish- 
ops will go on burgling like this, something must be 
done.' The whole point of the English romance is the 
exceptional character of a crime in high life. That is not 
the tone of American novels or American newspapers or 
American trials like the trial in Oklahoma. Americans 
may be excited when a millionaire crook is caught, as 
when any other crook is caught; but it is at his being 
caught, not at his being discovered. To put the matter 
shortly, England recognises a criminal class at the bottom 
of the social scale. America also recognises a criminal 



THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 185 

class at the top of the social scale. In both, for various 
reasons, it may be difficult for the criminals to be con- 
victed; but in America the upper class of criminals is 
recognised. In both America and England, of course, it 
exists. 

This is an assumption at the back of the American 
mind which makes a great difference in many ways; 
and in my opinion a difference for the better. I wrote 
merely fancifully just now about bishops being burglars; 
but there is a story in New York, illustrating this, which 
really does in a sense attribute a burglary to a bishop. 
The story was that an Anglican Lord Spiritual, of the 
pompous and now rather antiquated school, was pushing 
open the door of a poor American tenement with all the 
placid patronage of the squire and rector visiting the cot- 
tagers, when a gigantic Irish policeman came round the 
corner and hit him a crack over the head with a trun- 
cheon on the assumption that he was a house-breaker. I 
hope that those who laugh at the story see that the laugh 
is not altogether against the policeman ; and that it is not 
only the policeman, but rather the bishop, who had failed 
to recognise some final logical distinctions. The bishop, 
being a learned man, might well be called upon (when he 
had sufficiently recovered from the knock on the head) to 
define what is the exact difference between a house- 
breaker and a home- visitor; and why the home- visitor 
should not be regarded as a house-breaker when he will 
not behave as a guest. An impartial intelligence will be 
much less shocked at the policeman's disrespect for the 
home-visitor than by the home-visitor's disrespect for the 
home. 

But that story smacks of the western soil, precisely 
because of the element of brutality there is in it. In Eng- 



i86 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

land snobbishness and social oppression are much subtler 
and softer; the manifestations of them at least are more 
mellow and humane. In comparison there is indeed 
Something which people call ruthless about the air of 
America, especially the American cities. The bishop may 
push open the door without an apology, but he would 
not break open the door with a truncheon; but the Irish 
policeman's truncheon hits both ways. It may be brutal 
to the tenement dweller as well as to the bishop ; but the 
difference and distinction is that it might really be brutal 
to the bishop. It is because there is after all, at the back 
of all that barbarism, a Sort of a negative belief in the 
brotherhood of men, a dark democratic sense that men 
are really men and nothing more, that the coarse and 
even corrupt bureaucracy is not resented exactly as oligar- 
chic bureaucracies are resented. There is a sense in 
which corruption is not so narrow as nepotism. It is 
upon this queer cynical charity, and even humility, that 
it has been possible to rear so high and uphold so long 
that tower of brass, Tammany Hall. The modern police 
system is in spirit the most inhuman in history, and its 
evil belongs to an age and not to a nation. But some 
American police methods are evil past all parallel ; and the 
detective can be more crooked than a hundred crooks. 
But in the States it is not only possible that the policeman 
is worse than the convict. It is by no means certain that 
he thinks that he is any better. In the popular stories of 
O. Henry there are light allusions to tramps being thrown 
out of hotels which will make any Christian seek relief 
in strong language and a trust in heaven — not to say in 
hell. And yet books even more popular than O. Henry's 
are those of the 'sob-sisterhood' who swim in lachrymose 
lakes after love-lorn spinsters, who pass their lives in re- 



THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN 187 

claiming and consoling such tramps. There are in this 
people two strains of brutality and sentimentalism which 
I do not understand, especially where they mingle; but 
I am fairly sure they both work back to the dim demo- 
cratic origin. The Irish policeman does not confine him- 
self fastidiously to bludgeoning bishops; his truncheon 
finds plenty of poor people's heads to hit 5 and yet I believe 
on my soul he has a sort of sympathy with poor people 
not to be found in the poHce of more aristocratic states. 
I believe he also reads and weeps over the stories of the 
spinsters and the reclaimed tramps ; in fact, there is much 
of such pathos in an American magazine (my sole com- 
panion on many happy railway journeys) which is not 
only devoted to detective stories, but apparently edited by 
detectives. In these stories also there is the honest pop- 
ular astonishment at the Upper Ten expressed by the as- 
tronomical detective, if indeed he was a detective and not a 
demon from the dark Red-Indian forests that faded to the 
horizon behind him. But I have set him as the head and 
text of this chapter because with these elements of the 
Third Degree of devilry and the Seventh Heaven of 
sentimentalism I touch on elements that I do not under- 
stand ; and when I do not understand, I say so. 



THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 

THE heathen in his blindness bows down to wood 
and stone; especially to a wood-cut or a litho- 
graphic stone. Modern people put their trust 
in pictures, especially scientific pictures, as much as the 
most superstitious ever put it in religious pictures. They 
publish a portrait of the Missing Link as if he were the 
Missing Man, for whom the police are always advertis- 
ing; for all the world as if the anthropoid had been 
photographed before he absconded. The scientific dia- 
gram may be a hypothesis ; it may be a fancy ; it may be a 
forgery. But it is always an idol in the true sense of an 
image ; and an image in the true sense of a thing master- 
ing the imagination and not the reason. The power of 
these talismanic pictures is almost hypnotic to modern 
humanity. We can never forget that we have seen a por- 
trait of the Missing Link; though we should instantly 
detect the lapse of logic into superstition, if we were told 
that the old Greek agnostics had made a statue of the 
Unknown God. But there is a still stranger fashion in 
which we fall victims to the same trick of fancy. We 
accept in a blind and literal spirit, not only images of 
speculation, but even figures of speech. The nineteenth 
century prided itself on having lost its faith in myths, 
and proceeded to put all its faith in metaphors. It dis- 
missed the old doctrines about the way of life and the 
light of the world; and then it proceeded to talk as if the 
light of truth were really and literally a light, that could 

be absorbed by merely opening our eyes; or as if the path 

188 



THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 189 

of progress were really and truly a path, to be found by 
merely following our noses. Thus the purpose of God 
is an idea, true or false; but the purpose of Nature is 
merely a metaphor; for obviously if there is no God there 
is no purpose. Yet while men, by an imaginative in- 
stinct, spoke of the purpose of God with a grand agnosti- 
cism, as something too large to be seen, something reach- 
ing out to worlds and to eternities, they talk of the pur- 
pose of Nature in particular and practical problems of 
curing babies or cutting up rabbits. The power of the 
modern metaphor must be understood, by way of an in- 
troduction, if we are to understand one of the chief errors, 
at once evasive and pervasive, which perplex the problem 
of America. 

America is always spoken of as a young nation; and 
whether or no this be a valuable and suggestive metaphor, 
very few people notice that it is a metaphor at all. If 
somebody said that a certain deserving charity had just 
gone into trousers, we should recognise that it was a 
figure of speech, and perhaps a rather surprising figure of 
speech. If somebody said that a daily paper had recently 
put its hair up, we should know it could only be a meta- 
phor, and possibly a rather strained metaphor. Yet these 
phrases would mean the only thing that can possibly be 
meant by calling a corporate association of all sorts of 
people 'young' ; that is, that a certain institution has only 
existed for a certain time. I am not now denying that 
such a corporate nationality may happen to have a psy- 
chology comparatively analogous to the psychology of 
youth. I am not even denying that America has it. I am 
only pointing out, to begin with, that we must free our- 
selves from the talismanic tyranny of a metaphor which 
we do recognise as a metaphor. Men realised that the old 



190 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

mystical doctrines were mystical; they do not realise 
that the new metaphors are metaphorical. They have 
some sort of hazy notion that American society must be 
growing, must be promising, must have the virtues of 
hope or the faults of ignorance, merely because it has only 
had a separate existence since the eighteenth century. 
And that is exactly like saying that a new chapel must be 
growing taller, or that a limited liability company will 
soon have its second teeth. 

Now in truth this particular conception of American 
hopefulness would be anything but hopeful for America. 
If the argument really were, as it is still vaguely supposed 
to be, that America must have a long life before it, be- 
cause it only started in the eighteenth century, we should 
find a very fatal answer by looking at the other political 
systems that did start in the eighteenth century. The 
eighteenth century was called the Age of Reason; and 
there is a very real sense in which the other systems were 
indeed started in a spirit of reason. But starting 
from reason has not saved them from ruin. If we survey 
the Europe of to-day with real clarity and historic com- 
prehension, we shall see that it is precisely the most re- 
cent and the most rationalistic creations that have been 
ruined. The two great states which did most definitely 
and emphatically deserve to be called modern states were 
Prussia and Russia. There was no real Prussia before 
Frederick the Great; no real Russian Empire before 
Peter the Great. Both those innovators recognised 
themselves as rationalists bringing a new reason and 
order into an indeterminate barbarism; and doing for 
the barbarians what the barbarians could not do for 
themselves. They did not, like the kings of England 
or France or Spain or Scotland, inherit a sceptre that 



THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 191 

was the symbol of a historic and patriotic people. In 
this sense there was no Russia but only an Emperof 
of Russia. In this sense Prussia was a kingdom before 
it was a nation; if it ever was a nation. But anyhow 
both men were particularly modern in their whole mood 
and mind. They were modern to the extent of being 
not only anti-traditional, but almost anti-patriotic. 
Peter forced the science of the West on Russia to the re- 
gret of many Russians. Frederick talked the French of 
Voltaire and not the German of Luther. The two experi- 
ments were entirely in the spirit of Voltairean rationalism; 
they were built in broad daylight by men who believed in 
nothing but the light of common day; and already their 
day is done. 

If then the promise of America were in the fact tliat 
she is one of the latest births of progress, we should 
point out that it is exactly the latest born that were the 
first to die. If in this sense she is praised as young, it 
may be answered that the young have died young, and 
have not lived to be old. And if this be confused with 
the argument that she came in an age of clarity and 
scepticism, uncontaminated by old superstitions, it could 
still be retorted that the works of superstition have sur- 
vived the works of scepticism. But the truth is, of 
course, that the real quality of America is much more 
subtle and complex than this; and is mixed not only of 
good and bad, and rational and mystical, but also of old 
and new. That is what makes the task of tracing the 
true proportions of American life so interesting and so 
impossible. 

To begin with, such a metaphor is always as distract- 
ing as a mixed metaphor. It is a double-edged tool that 
cuts both ways; and consequently opposite ways. We 



192 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

use the same word *young' to mean two opposite ex- 
tremes. We mean something at an early stage of 
growth, and also something having the latest fruits of 
growth. We might call a commonwealth young if it 
conducted all its daily conversation by wireless telegra- 
phy; meaning that it was progressive. But we might 
also call it young if it conducted all its industry with 
chipped flints; meaning that it was primitive. These 
two meanings of youth are hopelessly mixed up when 
the word is applied to America. But what is more curi- 
ous, the two elements really are wildly .entangled in 
America. America is in some ways what is called in 
advance of the times, and in some ways what is called 
behind the times ; but it seems a little confusing to con- 
vey both notions by the same word. 

On the one hand, Americans often are successful in 
the last inventions. And for that very reason they are 
often neglectful of the last but one. It is true of men 
in general, dealing with things in general, that while 
they are progressing in one thing, such as science, they 
are going back in another thing, such as art. What is 
less fully realized is that this is true even as between dif- 
ferent methods of science. The perfection of wireless 
telegraphy might well be followed by the gross imper- 
fection of wires. The very enthusiasm of American 
science brings this out very vividly. The telephone in 
New York works miracles all day long. Replies from 
remote places come as promptly as in a private talk ; no- 
body cuts anybody off; nobody says, 'Sorry you've 
been troubled.' But then the postal service of New 
York does not work at all. At least I could never 
discover it working. Letters lingered in it for days 
and days, as in some wild Village of the Pyrenees. 



THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 193 

When I asked a taxi-driver to drive me to a post-office, 
a look of far-off vision and adventure came into his 
eyes, and he said he had once heard of a post-office 
somewhere near West Ninety- Seventh Street. Men 
are not efficient in everything-, but only in the fashion- 
able thing. This may be a mark of the march of 
science; it does certainly in one sense deserve the de- 
scription of youth. We can imagine a very young 
person forgetting the old toy in the excitement of a 
new one. 

But on the other hand, American manners contain 
much that is called young in the contrary sense; in the 
sense of an earlier stage of history. There are whole 
patches and particular aspects that seem to me quite 
Early Victorian. I cannot help having this sensation, 
for instance, about the arrangement for smoking in the 
railway carriages. There are no smoking carriages, as 
a rule ; but a corner of each of the great cars is curtained 
off mysteriously, that a man may go behind the curtain 
and smoke. Nobody thinks of a woman doing so. It 
is regarded as a dark, bohemian, and almost brutally 
masculine indulgence; exactly as it w^as regarded by the 
dowagers in Thackeray's novels. Indeed, this is one of 
the many such cases in which extremes meet; the ex- 
tremes of stuffy antiquity and cranky modernity. The 
American dowager is sorry that tobacco was ever intro- 
duced; and the American suffragette and social re- 
former is considering whether tobacco ought not to be 
abolished. The tone of American society suggests 
some sort of compromise, by which women will be 
allowed to smoke, but men forbidden to do so. 

In one respect, however, America is very old indeed. 
In one respect America is more historic than England; 



194 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

I might almost say more archaeological than England. 
The record of one period of the past, morally remote 
and probably irrevocable, is there preserved in a more 
perfect form as a pagan city is preserved at Pompeii. 
In a more general sense, of course, it is easy to exag- 
gerate the contrast as a mere contrast between the old 
world and the new. There is a superficial satire about 
the millionaire's daughter who has recently become the 
wife of an aristocrat; but there is a rather more subtle 
satire in the question of how long the aristocrat has 
been aristocratic. There is often much misplaced 
mockery of a marriage between an upstart's daughter 
and a decayed relic of feudalism; when it is really a 
marriage between an upstart's daughter and an upstart's 
grandson. The sentimental socialist often seems to 
admit the blue blood of the nobleman, even when he 
wants to shed it; just as he seems to admit the mar- 
vellous brains of the millionaire, even when he wants to 
blow them out Unfortunately (in the interests of 
social science, of course) the sentimental socialist never 
does go so far as bloodshed or blowing out brains ; other- 
wise the colour and quality of both blood and brains 
would probably be a disappointment to him. There are 
certainly more American families that really came over 
in the Mayflower than English families that really came 
over with the Conqueror; and an English county family 
clearly dating from the time of the Mayflower would be 
considered a very traditional and historic house. Never- 
theless, there are ancient things in England, though the 
aristocracy is hardly one of them. There are buildings, 
there are institutions, there are even ideas in England 
which do preserve, as in a perfect pattern, some particular 
epoch of the past, and even of the remote past. A man 



THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 195 

could study the Middle Ages in Lincoln aa well as in 
Rouen; in Canterbury as well as in Cologne. Even of 
the Renaissance the same is true, at least on the literary 
side; if Shakespeare was later he was also greater than 
Ronsard. But the point is that the spirit and philosophy 
of the periods were present in fullness and in freedom. 
The guildsmen were as Christian in England as they 
were anywhere; the poets were as pagan in England as 
they were anywhere. Personally I do not admit that 
the men who served patrons were freer than those who 
served patron saints. But each fashion had its own kind 
of freedom ; and the point is that the English, in each case, 
had the fullness of that kind of freedom. But there was 
another ideal of freedom which the English never had at 
all; or, anyhow, never expressed at all. There was an- 
other ideal, the soul of another epoch, round which we 
built no monuments and wrote no masterpieces. You 
will find no traces of it in England; but you will find 
them in America. 

The thing I mean was the real religion of the eight- 
eenth century. Its religion, in the more defined sense, 
was generally Deism, as in Robespierre or Jefferson. 
In the more general way of morals and atmosphere it 
was rather Stoicism, as in the suicide of Wolfe Tone. 
It had certain very noble and, as some would say, im- 
possible ideals; as that a politician should be poor, and 
should be proud of being poor. It knew Latin; and 
therefore insisted on the strange fancy that the Republic 
should be a public thing. Its Republican simplicity was 
anything but a silly pose; unless all martyrdom is a silly 
pose. Even of the prigs and fanatics of the American 
and French Revolutions we can often say, as Stevenson 
said of an American, that 'thrift and courage glowed in 



196 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

him/ And its virtue and value for us is that it did 
remember the things we now most tend to forget; from 
the dignity of liberty to the danger of luxury. It did 
really believe in self-determination, in the self-determina- 
tion of the self, as well as of the state. And its deter- 
mination was really determined. In short, it believed in 
self-respect; and it is strictly true even of its rebels and 
regicides that they desired chiefly to be respectable. But 
there were in it the marks of religion as well as respect- 
ability; it had a creed; it had a crusade. Men died 
singing its songs ; men starved rather than write against 
its principles. And its principles were liberty, equality, 
and fraternity, or the dogmas of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. This was the idea that redeemed the dreary 
negations of the eighteenth century; and there are still 
corners of Philadelphia or Boston or Baltimore where 
we can feel so suddenly in the silence its plain garb and 
formal manners, that the walking ghost of Jefferson 
would hardly surprise us. 

There is not the ghost of such a thing in England. 
In England the real religion of the eighteenth century 
never found freedom or scope. It never cleared a space 
in which to build that cold and classic building called 
the Capitol. It never made elbow-room for that free if 
sometimes frigid figure called the Citizen. 

In eighteenth-century England he was crowded out, 
partly perhaps by the relics of better things of the past, 
but largely at least by the presence of much worse things 
in the present. The worst things kept out the best 
things of the eighteenth century. The ground was 
occupied by legal fictions; by a godless Erastian church 
and a powerless Hanoverian king. Its realties were an 
aristocracy of Regency dandies, in costumes made to 



THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 197 

hiatch Brighton Pavilion; a paganism not frigid but 
florid. It was a touch of this aristocratic waste in Fox 
that prevented that great man from being a glorious 
exception. It is therefore well for us to realise that 
there is something in history which we did not expe- 
rience; and therefore probably something in Americans 
that we do not understand. There was this idealism at 
the very beginning of their individualism. There was 
a note of heroic publicity and honourable poverty which 
lingers in the very name of Cincinnati. 

But I have another and special reason for noting this 
historical fact ; the fact that we English never made any- 
thing upon the model of a capitol, while we can match 
anybody with the model of a cathedral. It is far from 
improbable that the latter model may again be a working 
model. For I have myself felt, naturally and for a long 
time, a warm sympathy with both those past ideals, which 
seem to some so incompatible. I have felt the attraction 
of the red cap as well as the red cross, of the Marseillaise 
as well as the Magnificat. And even when they were in 
furious conflict I have never altogether lost my sympathy 
for either. But in the conflict between the Republic and 
the Church, the point often made against the Church 
seems to me much more of a point against the Republic. * 
It is emphatically the Republic and not the Church that I 
venerate as something beautiful but belonging to the 
past. In fact I feel exactly the same sort of sad respect 
for the republican ideal that many mid-Victorian free- 
thinkers felt for the religious ideal. The most sincere 
poets of that period were largely divided between those 
who insisted, like Arnold and Clough, that Christianity 

♦Throughout the conclusion of this chapter I mean by the Re- 
pubdic not merely the American system, but the whole modern 
elective system, as in France or even in England. 



198 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

might be a ruin, but after all it must be treated as a 
picturesque ruin; and those, like Swinburne, who in- 
sisted that it might be a picturesque ruin, but after all it 
must be treated as a ruin. But surely their own pagan 
temple of political liberty is now much more of a ruin 
than the other; and I fancy I am one of the few who 
still take off their hats in that ruined temple. That is 
why I went about looking for the fading traces of that 
lost cause, in the old-world atmosphere of the new 
world. 

But I do not, as a fact, feel that the cathedral is a ruin ; 
I doubt if I should feel it even if I wished to lay it in 
ruins. I doubt if Mr. McCabe really thinks that Catholi- 
cism is dying, though he might deceive himself into saying 
so. Nobody could be naturally moved to say that the 
crowded cathedral of St. Patrick in New York was a 
ruin, or even that the unfinished Anglo-Catholic cathe- 
dral at Washington was a ruin, though it is not yet a 
church; or that there is anything lost or lingering about 
the splendid and spirited Gothic churches springing up 
under the inspiration of Mr. Cram of Boston. As a 
matter of feeling, as a matter of fact, as a matter quite 
apart from theory or opinion, it is not in the religious 
centres that we now have the feeling of something beau- 
tiful but receding, of something loved but lost. It is 
exactly in the spaces cleared and levelled by America for 
the large and sober religion of the eighteenth century; 
it is where an old house in Philadelphia contains an old 
picture of Franklin, or where the men of Maryland 
raised above their city the first monument of Washing- 
ton. It is there that I feel like one who treads alone 
some banquet hall deserted, whose lights are fled, whose 



THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RUINS 199 

garlands dead, and all save he departed. It 13 then 
that I feel as if I were the last Republican. 

But when I say that the Republic of the Age of Reason 
is now a ruin, I should rather say that at its best it is a 
ruin. At its worst it has cdlapsed into a d'eath-trap or 
is rotting like a dunghill. What is the real Republic of 
our day, as distinct from the ideal Republic of our fa- 
thers, but a heap of corrupt capitalism crawling with 
worms; with those parasites, the professional politicians? 
I was re-reading Swinburne's bitter but not ignoble 
poem, ^Before a Crucifix,' in which he bids Chri-st, or the 
ecclesiastical image of Christ, stand out of the way of 
the onward march of political idealism represented by 
United Italy or the French Republic. I was struck by 
the strange and ironic exactitude with which every taunt 
he flings at the degradation of the old divine ideal would 
now fit the degradation of his own human ideal. The 
time has already come when we can ask his Goddess of 
Liberty, as represented by the actual Liberals, *Have 
you filled full men's starved-out souls ; have you brought 
freedom on the earth ?' For every engine in which these 
old free-thinkers firmly and confidently trusted has itself 
become an engine of oppression and even of class oppres- 
sion. Its free Parliament has become an oligarchy. Its 
free press has become a monopoly. If the pure Church 
has been corrupted in the course of two thousand years, 
what about the pure Republic that has rotted into a filthy 
plutocracy in less than a hundred? 

O hidden face of man, whereover 
The years have woven a viewless veil, 
If thou wert verily man's lover 



200 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

What did thy love or blood avail? 
Thy blood the priests make poison of; 
And in gold shekels coin thy love. 

Which has most to do with shekels to-day, the 
priests or the politicians? Can v^e say in any special 
sense nowadays that clergymen, as such, make a poison 
out of the blood of the martyrs ? Can we say it in any- 
thing like the real sense, in which we do say that yellow 
journalists make a poison out of the blood of the soldiers? 

But I understand how Swinburne felt when con- 
fronted by the image of the carven Christ, and, per- 
plexed by the contrast between its claims and its con- 
sequences, he said his strange farewell to it, hastily in- 
deed, but not without regret, not even really without re- 
spect. I felt the same myself when I looked for the 
last time on thei Statue of Liberty. 



IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 

A CERTAIN ^Ind of question is asked very earn- 
estly in our time. Because of a certain logical 
quality in it, connected with premises and data, 
it is very difficult to answer. Thus people will ask what 
is the hidden weakness in the Celtic race that makes it 
everywhere fail or fade away; or how the Germans con- 
trived to bring all their organisation into a state of such 
perfect efficiency; and what was the significance of the re- 
cent victory of Prussia. Ojr they will ask by what stages 
the modern world has abandoned all behef in miracles; 
and the modern newspapers ceased to print any news of 
murders. They will a^k why English politics are free 
from corruption; or by what mental and moral training 
certain millionaires were enabled to succeed by sheer 
force of character; in short, they will ask why plutocrats 
govern* well and "how it is that pigs fly, spreading their 
pink pinions to the breeze or delighting us as they twitter 
and flutter from tree to tree. The logical difficulty of 
answering these questions is connected with an old story 
about Charles the Second and a bowl of goldfish, and 
with another anecdote about a gentleman who was asked, 
When did you leave off beating you.r wife?' But there 
is something analogous to it in the present discussions 
about the forces drawing England and America together. 
It seems as if the reasoners hardly went far enough back 
in their argument, or took trouble enough to disentangle 
their assumptions. They are still moving with the mo- 
mentum of the peculiar nineteenth-century notion of prog- 

201 



202 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

ress; of certain very simple tendencies perpetually in- 
creasing and needing no special analysis. It is so with 
the international rapprochement I have to consider here. 

In other places I have ventured to express a doubt about 
whether nations can be drawn together by an ancient ru- 
mour about races ; by a sort of prehistoric chit-chat or the 
gossip of the Stone Age. I have ventured farther; and 
even expressed a doubt about whether they ought to be 
drawn together, or rather dragged together, by the brute 
violence of the engines of science and speed. But there 
is yet another horrible doubt haunting my morbid mind, 
which it will be better for my constitution to confess 
frankly. And that is the doubt about whether they are 
being drawn together at all. 

It has long been a conversational commonplace among 
the enlightened that all countries are coming closer and 
closer to each other. It was a conversational common- 
place among the enlightened, somewhere about the year 
19 1 3, that all wars were receding farther and farther into 
a barbaric past. There is something about these sayings 
that seems simple and familiar and entirely satisfactory 
when we say them ; they are of that consoling sort which 
we can say without any of the mental pain of thinking 
what we are saying. But if we turn our attention from 
the phrases we use to the facts that we talk about, we 
shall realise at least that there are a good many facts on 
the other side and examples pointing the other way. For 
instance, it does happen occasionally, from time to time, 
that people talk about Ireland. He would be a very hi- 
larious humanitarian who should maintain that Ireland 
and England have been more and more assimilated during 
the last hundred years. The very name of Sinn Fein is 
an answer to it, and the very language in which that 



IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 203 

phrase is spoken. Curran and Sheil would no more have 
dreamed of uttering the watchword of 'Repeal' in Gaelic 
than of uttering it in Zulu. Grattan could, hardly have 
brought himself to believe that the real repeal of the 
Union would actually be signed in London in the strange 
script as remote as the* snaky ornament of the Celtic 
crosses. It would have seemed like Washington signing 
the Declaration of Independence in the* picture-writing 
of the Red Indians. Ireland has clearly grown away 
from England; and her language, literature, and type of 
patriotism are far less English than they were. On the 
other hand, no one will pretend that the m^ass of mod- 
ern Englishmen are much nearer to talking Gaelic or 
decorating Celtic crosses. A hundred years ago it was 
perfectly natural that Byron and Moore should walk 
down the street arm in arm. Even the sight of Mr. 
Rudyard Kipling and Mr. W. B. Yeats walking down the 
street arm in arm would now arouse some remark. 

I could give any number of other examples of the same 
new estrangement of nations. I could cite the obvi- 
ous facts that Norway and Sweden parted company not 
very long ago, that Austria and Hungary have again be- 
come separate States. I could point to the mob of new 
nations that have started up after the war; to the fact 
that the great empires are now nearly all broken up ; that 
the Russian Empire no longer directs Poland, that the 
Austrian Empire no longer directs Bohemia, that the 
Turkish Empire no longer directs Palestine. Sinn Fein 
is the separatism of the Irish. Zionism is the separatism 
of the Jews. But there is one simple and sufficing ex- 
ample, which is here more to my purpose, and is at least 
equally sufficient for it. And that is the deepening na- 
tional difference between the Americans and the English. 



204 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

Let me test it first by my individual experience in the 
matter of literature. When I was a boy I read a book 
like The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table exactly as I read 
another book like The Book of Snobs. I did not think 
of it as an American book, but simply as a book. Its wit 
and idiom were like those of the English literary tra- 
dition ; and its few touches of local colour seemed merely 
accidental, like those of an Englishman who happened to 
be living in Switzerland or Sweden. My father and my 
father's friends were rightly enthusiastic for the 
book; so that it seemed to come to me by inheritance 
like Gulliver's Travels or Tristram Shandy. Its language 
was as English as Ruskin, and a great deal more English 
than Carlyle. Well, I have seen in later years an almost 
equally wide and well-merited popularity of the stories of 
O. Henry. But never for one moment could I or any 
one else reading them forget that they were stories by an 
American about America. The very first fact about 
them is that they are told with an American accent, that 
is, in the unmistakable tones of a brilliant and fascinating 
foreigner. And the same is true of every other recent 
work of which the fame has managed to cross the Atlan- 
tic. We did not say that The Spoon River Anthology 
was a new book, but that it was a new book from Amer- 
ica. It was exactly as if a remarkable realistic novel 
was reported from Russia or Italy. We were in no 
danger of confusing it with the 'Elegy in a Country 
Churchyard.'* People in England who heard of Main 
Street were not likely to identify it with a High Street; 
with the principal thoroughfare in any little town in Berk- 
shire or Buckinghamshire. But when I was a boy I prac- 
tically identified the boarding-house of the Autocrat with 
any boarding-house I happened to know in Brompton or 



IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 205 

Brighton. No doubt there were differences; but the 
point is that the differences did not pierce the conscious- 
ness or prick the illusion. I said to myself, Teople are 
like this in boarding-houses,' not Teople are like this in 
Boston.' 

This can be seen even in the simple matter of language, 
especially in the sense of slang. Take, for instance, the 
delightful sketch in the causerie of Oliver Wendell 
Holmes; the character of the young man called John. 
He is a very modern type in every modern country who 
does specialise in slang. He is the young fellow who is 
something in the City; the^ everyday young man of the 
Gilbertian song, with a stick and a pipe and a half-bred 
black-and-tan. In every country he is at once witty and 
commonplace. In every country, therefore, he tends 
both to the vivacity and the vulgarity of slang. But 
when he appeared in Holmes's book, his language was not 
very different from what it would have been in a Brighton 
instead of a Boston boarding-house; or, in short, if the 
young man called John had more commonly been called 
'Arry. If he had appeared in a modern American book, 
his language would have been almost literally unintelli- 
gible. At the least an Englishman would have to read 
some of the best sentences twice, as he sometimes has to 
read the dizzy and involved metaphors of O. Henry. 
Nor is it an answer that this depended on the personali- 
ties of the particular writers. A comparison between 
the real journalism of the time of Holmes and the real 
journalism of the time of Henry reveals the same thing. 
It is the expansion of a slight difference of style into a 
luxuriant difference of idiom; and the process continued 
indefinitely would certainly produce a totally different 
language. After a few centuries .the signatures of 



2o6 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

American ambassadors would look as fantastic as Gaelic, 
and the very name of the Republic be as strange as Sinn 
Fein. 

It is true that there has been on the surface a certain 
amount of give and take; or at least, as far as the Eng- 
lish are concerned, of take rather than give. But it is 
true that it was once all the other way ; and indeed the one 
thing is something like a ju.st nemesis of the other. In- 
deed, the story of the reversal is somewhat singular, 
when we come to think of it. It began in a certain at- 
mosphere and spirit of certain well-meaning people who 
talked about the English-speaking race; and were ap- 
parently indifferent to how the English was spoken, 
whether in the accent of a Jamaican negro or a convict 
from Botany Bay. It was their logical tendency to say 
that Dante was a Dago. It was their logical punishment 
to say that Disraeli was an Englishman. Now there 
may have been a period when this Anglo-American 
amalgamation included more or less equal elements from 
England and America. It never included the larger ele- 
ments, or the more valuable elements of either. But, on 
the whole, I think it true to say that it was not an allot- 
ment but an interchange of parts; and that things first 
went all one way and then all the other. People began 
by telling the Americans that they owed all their past 
triumphs to England; which was false. They ended up 
by telling the English that they would owe all their future 
triumphs to America; which is if possible still more false. 
Because we chose to forget that New York had been 
New Amsterdam, we are now in danger of forgetting 
that London is not New York. Because we insisted that 
Chicago was only a pious imitation of Chiswick, we may 
yet see Chiswick an inferior imitation of Chicago. Our 



IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 207 

Anglo-Saxon historians attempted that conquest in which 
Howe and Burgoyne had failed, and with infinitely less 
justification on their side. They attempted the great 
crime of the Anglicisation of America. They have 
called down the punishment of the Americanisation of 
England. We must not murmur; but it is a heavy pun- 
ishment. 

It may lift a little of its load, however, if we look at 
it more closely; we shall then find that though it is very 
much on top of us, it is only on top. In that sense such 
Americanisation as there is is very superficial. For in- 
stance, there is a certain amount of American slang 
picked up at random ; it appears in certain pushing types 
of journalism and drama. But we may easily dwell too 
much on this tragedy; of people who have never spoken 
English beginning to speak American. I am far from 
suggesting that American, like any other foreign lan- 
guage, may not frequently^ contribute to the common cul- 
ture of the world phrases for which there is no sub- 
stitute ; there are French phrases so used in England and 
English phrases in France. The word *high-brow,' for 
instance, is a real discovery and revelation, a new and 
necessary name for something that walked nameless but 
enormous in the modern world, a shaft of light and a 
stroke of lightning. That comes from America and be- 
longs to the world, as much as 'The Raven' or The Scar- 
let Letter or the novels of Henry James belong to the 
world. In fact, I can imagine Henry James originating 
it in the throes of self-expression, and bringing out a 
word like 'high-browed,' with a sort of gentle jerk, at 
the end of searching sentences which groped sensitively 
until they found the phrase. But most of the American 
slang that is borrowed seems to be borrowed for no par tic- 



2o8 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

(ular reason. It either has no point or the point is lost by 
translation into another context and culture. It is either 
something which does not need any grotesque and exag- 
gerative description, or of which there already exists a 
grotesque and exaggerative description more native to 
our tongue and soil. For instance, I cannot see that the 
strong and simple expression 'Now it is for you to pull 
the police magistrate's nose' is in any way strengthened 
by saying, *Now it is up to you to pull the police magis- 
trate's nose.' When Tennyson says of the men of the 
Light Brigade 'Theirs but to do and die,' the expression 
seems to me perfectly lucid. 'Up to them to do and die' 
would alter the metre without especially clarifying the 
meaning. This is an example of ordinary language being 
quite adequate; but there is a further difficulty that even 
wild slang comes to sound like ordinary language. Very 
often the English have already as humorous and fanciful 
idiom of their own, only that through habit it has lost 
its humour. When Keats wrote the line. What pipes 
and timbrels, what wild ecstasy!' I am willing to believe 
that the American humorist would have expressed the 
same sentiment by beginning the sentence with 'Some 
pipe !' When that was first said, somewhere in the wilds 
of Colorado, it was really funny; involving a powerful 
understatement and the suggestion of a mere sample. If 
a spinster has informed us that she keeps a bird, and we 
find it is an ostrich, there will be considerable point in the 
Colorado satirist saying inquiringly, 'Some bird?' as if he 
were offering us a small slice of a small plover. But if 
we go back to this root and rationale of a joke, the Eng- 
lish language already contains quite as good a joke. It 
is not necessary to say, 'Some bird'; there is a far finer 
irony in the old expression, 'Something like a bird.' It 



IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 209 

suggests that the speaker sees something faintly and 
strangely birdlike about a bird; that it remotely and al- 
most irrationally reminds him of a bird; and that there is 
about ostrich plumes a yard long something like the faint 
and delicate traces of a feather. It has every quality of 
imaginative irony, except that nobody even imagines it 
to be ironical. All that happens is that people get tired 
of that turn of phrase, take up a foreign phrase and get 
tired of that, without realising the point of either. All 
that happens is that a number of weary people who used 
to say 'Something like a bird,' now say, 'Some bird,' with 
undiminished weariness. But they might just as well 
use dull and decent English; for in both cases they are 
only using jocular language without seeing the joke. 

There is indeed a considerable trade in the transplanta- 
tion of these American jokes to England just now. They 
generally pine and die in our climate, or they are dead 
before their arrival; but we cannot be certain that they 
■were never alive. There is a sort of unending frieze or 
scroll of decorative designs unrolled ceaselessly before 
the British public, about a hen-pecked husband, which is 
indistinguishable to the eye from an actual self -repeat- 
ing pattern like that of the Greek key, but which is im- 
ported as if it were as precious and irreplaceable as the 
Elgin Marbles. Advertisement and syndication make 
mountains out of the most funny little mole-hills; but 
no doubt the mole-hills are picturesque enough in their 
own landscape. In any case there is nothing so national 
as humour; and many things, like many people, can be 
humorous enough when they are at home. But these 
American jokes are boomed as solemnly as American 
religions ; and their supporters gravely testify that they are 
funny, without seeing the fun of it for a moment. This 



2IO WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

is partly perhaps the spirit of spontaneous intitutional- 
ism in American democracy, breaking out in the wrong 
place. They make humour an institution; and a man 
will be set to tell an anecdote as if to play the violin. But 
when the story is told in America it really is amusing; 
and when these jokes are reprinted in England they are 
often not even intelligible. With all the stupidity of the 
millionaire and the monopolist, the enterprising proprietor 
prints jokes in England which are necessarily unintellig- 
ible to nearly every English person; jokes referring to 
domestic and local conditions quite peculiar to America. 
I saw one of these narrative caricatures the other day in 
which the whole of the joke (what there was of it) turned 
on the astonishment of a housewife at the absurd notion 
of not having an ice-box. It is perfectly true that nearly 
every ordinary American housewife possesses an ice-box. 
An ordinary English housewife would no more expect 
to possess an ice-box than to possess an iceberg. And 
it would be about as sensible to tow an iceberg to an 
English port all the way from the North Pole, as to trail 
that one pale and frigid joke to Fleet Street all the way 
from the New York papers. It is the same with a hun- 
dred other advertisements and adaptions. I have 
already confessed that I took a considerable delight in 
the dancing illuminations of Broadway — in Broadway. 
Everything there is suitable to them, the vast intermin- 
able thoroughfare, the toppling houses, the dizzy and rest- 
less spirit of the whole city. It is a city of dissolving 
views, and one may almost say a city in everlasting dis- 
solution. But I do not especially admire a burning frag- 
ment of Broadway stuck up opposite the old Georgian 
curve of Regent Street. I would as soon express sym- 
pathy with the Republic of Switzerland by erecting a small 



IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 211 

Alp, with imitation snow, in the middle of St. James's 
Park. 

But all this commercial copying is very superficial; 
and above all, it never copies anything that i^ really worth 
copying. Nations never learn anything from each other 
in this way. We have many things to learn from Amer- 
ica ; but we only listen to those Americans who have still 
to learn them. Thus, for instance, we do not import 
the small farm but only the big shop. In other words, 
w© hear nothing of the democracy of the Middle West, but 
everything of the plutocracy of the middleman, who is 
probably as unpopular in the Middle West as the miller 
in the Middle Ages. If Mr. Elihu K. Pike could be 
transplanted bodily from the neighbourhood of his home 
town of Marathon, Neb., with his farm and his frame- 
house and all its fittings, and they could be set down 
exactly in the spot now occupied by Self ridge's (which 
could be easily cleared away for the purpose), I think 
we could really get a great deal of good by watching him, 
even if the watching were inevitably a little too like 
watching a wild beast in a cage or an insect under a glass 
case. Urban crowds could collect every day behind a 
barrier or railing, and gaze at Mr. Pike pottering about 
all day in his ancient and autochthonous occupations. 
We could see him growing Indian corn with all the grav- 
ity of an Indian; though it is impossible to imagine Mrs. 
Pike blessing the cornfield in the manner of Minnehaha. 
As I have said, there is a certain lack of humane myth 
and mysticism about this Puritan peasantry. But we 
could see him transforming the maize into pop-corn, which 
is a very pleasant domestic ritual and pastime, and is the 
American equivalent of the glory of roasting chestnuts. 
Above all, many of us would learn for the first time that 



212 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

a man can really live and walk about upon something more 
productive than a pavement ; and that when he does so he 
can really be a free man, and have no lord but the law. 
Instead of that, America can give nothing to London but 
those multiple modern shops, of which it has too many 
already. I know that many people entertain the innocent 
illusion that big shops are more efficient than small ones ; 
but that is only because the big combinations have the 
monopoly of advertisement as well as trade. The big 
shop is not in the least remarkable for efficiency ; it is only 
too big to be blamed for its inefficiency. It is secure in its 
reputation for always sacking the wrong man. A big 
shop, considered as a place to shop in, is simply a village 
of small shops roofed in to keep out the light and air; 
and one in which none of the shopkeepers are really re- 
sponsible for their shops. If any one has any doubts on 
this matter, since I have mentioned it, let him consider 
this fact : that in practice we never do apply this method 
of commercial combination to anything that matters very 
much. We do not go to the surgical department of the 
Stores to have a portion of our brain removed by a deli- 
cate operation ; and then pass on to the advocacy depart- 
ment to employ one or any of its barristers, when we are 
in temporary danger of being hanged. We go to men 
who own their own tools and are responsible for the use 
of their own talents. And the same truth applies to that 
other modern method of advertisement, which has also 
so largely fallen across us like the gigantic shadow of 
America. Nations do not arm themselves for a mortal 
struggle by remembering which sort of submarine they 
have seen most often on the hoardings. They can do it 
about something like soap, precisely because a nation will 
not perish by having a second-rate sort of soap, as it 



IS THE ATLANTIC NARROWING? 213 

might by having a second-rate sort of submarine. A 
nation may indeed perish slowly by having a second- 
rate sort of food or drink or medicine; but that is another 
and much longer story, and the story is not ended yet. 
But nobody wins a great battle at a great crisis because 
somebody has told him that Cadgerboy's Cavalry Is the 
Bes)t. It may be that commercial enterprise will eventu- 
ally cover these fields also, and advertisement-agents will 
provide the instruments of the surgeon and the weapons 
of the soldier. When that happns, the armies will be de- 
feated and the patients will die. But though we modern 
people are indeed patients, in the sense of being merely 
receptive and accepting things with astonishing patience, 
we are not dead yet; and we have lingering gleams of 
sanity. 

For the best things do not travel. As I appear here as 
a traveller, I may say with all modesty that the best people 
do not travel either. Both in England and America the 
normal people are the national people ; and I repeat that I 
think they are growing more and more national. I do 
not think the abyss is being bridged by cosmopolitan 
theories; and I am sure I do not want it bridged by all 
this slang journalism and blatant advertisement. I have 
called all that commercial pubHcity the gigantic shadow 
of America. It may be the shadow of America, but it 
is not the light of America. The light lies far beyond, 
a level light upon the lands of sunset, where it shines upon 
wide places full of a very simple and a very happy people; 
and those who would see i^ must seek for it. 



LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 

IT has already been remarked here that the English 
know a great deal about past American literature, 
but nothing about past American history. They 
do not know either, of course, as well as they know the 
present American advertising, which is the least import- 
ant of the three. But it is worth noting once more how 
little they know of the history, and how illogically that 
little is chosen. They have heard, no doubt, of the fame 
and the greatness of Henry Clay. He is a cigar. But 
it would be unwise to cross-examine any Englishman, 
who may be consuming that luxury at the moment, about 
the Missouri Compromise or the controversies with An- 
drew Jackson. And just as the statesman of Kentucky 
is a cigar, so the state of Virginia is a cigarette. But 
there is perhaps one exception, or half -exception, to this 
simple plan. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to 
say that Plymouth Rock is a chicken. Any English 
person keeping chickens, and chiefly interested in Ply- 
mouth Rocks considered as chickens, would nevertheless 
have a hazy sensation of having seen the word somewhere 
before. He would feel subconsciously that the Plymouth 
Rock had not always been a chicken. Indeed, the name 
connotes something not only solid but antiquated; and 
is not therefore a very tactful name for a chicken. There 
would rise up before him something memorable in the 
haze that he calls his history ; and he would see the history 
books of his boyhood and old engravings of men in stee- 
ple-crowned hats struggling with sea-waves or Red In- 

214 



LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 215 

dians. The whole thing would suddenly become clear to 
him if (by a simple reform) the chickens were called 
Pilgrim Fathers. 

Then he would remember all about it. The Pilgrim 
Fathers were champions of religious liberty; and they 
discovered America. It is true that he has also heard 
of a man called Christopher Columbus; but that was in 
connection with an egg. He has also heard of some- 
body known as Sir Walter Raleigh ; and though his prin- 
cipal possession was a cloak, it is also true that he had a 
potato, not to mention a pipe of tobacco. Can it be pos- 
sible that he brought it from Virginia, where the cigar- 
ettes come from? Gradually the memories will come 
back and fit themselves together for the average hen-wife 
who learnt history at the English elementary schools, and 
who has now something better to do. Even when the 
narrative becomes consecutive, it will not necessarily be- 
come correct. It is not strictly true to say that the Pil- 
grim Fathers discovered America. But it is quite as 
true as saying that they were champions of religious 
liberty. If we said that they were martyrs who would 
have died heroically in torments rather than tolerate any 
religious liberty, we should be talking something like sense 
about them, and telling the real truth that is their due. 
The whole Puritan movement, from the Solemn League 
and Covenant to the last stand of the last Stuarts, was 
a struggle against religious toleration, or what they 
would have called religious indifiference. The first re- 
ligious equality on earth was established by a Catholic 
cavalier in Maryland. Now there is nothing in this to 
diminish any dignity that belongs to any real virtues and 
virilities in the Pilgrim Fathers; on the contrary, it is 
rather to the credit of their consistency and conviction. 



2i6 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

But there is no doubt that the note of their whole experi- 
ment in New England was intolerance, and even inquisi- 
tion. And there is no doubt that New England was then 
only the newest and not the oldest of these colonial ex- 
periments. At least two cavaliers had been in the field 
before any Puritans. And they had carried with them 
much more of the atmosphere and nature of the normal 
Englishman than any Puritan could possibly carry. 
They had established it especially in Virginia, which had 
been founded by a great Elizabethan and named after 
the great EHzabeth. Before there was any New England 
in the North, there was something very like Old Eng- 
land in the South. Relatively speaking, there is still. 
Whenever the anniversary of the Mayflower comes 
round, there is a chorus of Anglo-American congratula- 
tion and comradeship, as if this at least were a matter on 
which all can agree. But I knew enough about America, 
even before I went there, to know that there are a good 
many people there at any rate who do not agree with it. 
Long ago I wrote a protest in which I asked why English- 
men had forgotten the great state of Virginia, the first 
in foundation and long the first in leadership ; and why a 
few crabbed Nonconformists should have the right to 
erase a record that begins with Raleigh and ends with 
Lee, and incidentally includes Washington. The great 
state of Virginia was the backbone of America until it 
was broken in the Civil War. From Virginia came the 
first great Presidents and most of the Fathers of the 
'Republic. Its adherence to the Southern side in the war 
was what made it a great war, and for a long time a 
doubtful war. And in the leader of the Southern armies 
it produced what is perhaps the one modern figure that 



LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 217 

may come to shine like St. Louis in the lost battle, or 
Hector dying before holy Troy. 

Again, it is characteristic that while the modern English 
know nothing about Lee they do know something about 
Lincoln; and nearly all that they know is wrong. They 
know nothing of his Southern connections, nothing of his 
considerable Southern sympathy, nothing of the meaning 
of his moderation in face of the problem of slavery, now 
lightly treated as self-evident. Above all, they know 
nothing -about the respect in which Lincoln was quite un- 
English, was indeed the very reverse of English; and 
can be understood better if we think of him as a French- 
man, since it seems so hard for some of us to believe 
that he was an American. I mean his lust for logic for 
its own sake, and the way he kept mathematical truths 
in his mind like the fixed stars. He was so far from 
being a merely practical man, impatient of academic ab- 
stractions, that he reviewed and revelled in academic 
abstractions, even while he could not apply them to prac- 
tical life. He loved to repeat that slavery was intoler- 
able while he tolerated it, and to prove t'hat something 
ought to be done while it was impossible to do it. This 
was probably very bewildering to his brother-politicians ; 
for politicians always whitewash what they do not de- 
stroy. But for all that this inconsistency beat the politi- 
cians at their own game, and this abstracted logic proved 
the most practical of all. For when the chance did come 
to do something, there was no doubt about the thing to be 
done. The thunderbolt fell from the clear heights of 
heaven ; it h'ad not been tossed about and lost like a com- 
mon missile in the market-place. The matter is worth 
mentioning, because it has a moral for a much larger mod- 
ern question. A wise man's attiude towards industrial 



2i8 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

capitalism will be very like Lincoln's attitude towards 
slavery. That is, he will manage to endure capitalism; 
but he will not endure a defence of. capitalism. He 
will recognise the value, not only of knowing what he is 
doing, but of knowing what he would like to do. He will 
recognise the importance of having a thing clearly labelled 
in his own mind as bad, long before the opportunity comes 
to abolish it. He may recognise the risk of even worse 
things in immediate abolition, as Lincoln did in abolition- 
ism. He will not call all business men brutes, any more 
than* Lincoln would call all planters demons; because he 
knows they are not. He will regard many alternatives to 
capitalism as crude and inhuman, as Lincoln regarded 
John Brown's raid ; because they are. But he will clear 
his mind from cant about capitalism; he will have no 
doubt of what is the truth about Trusts and Trade Com- 
bines and the concentration of. capital; and it is the 
truth that they endure under one of the ironic silences of 
heaven, over the pageants and the passing triumphs of 
hell. 

But the name of Lincoln has a more immediate refer- 
ence to the international matters I am considering here. 
His name has been much invoked by English politicians 
and journalists in connection with the quarrel with Ire- 
land. And if we study the matter, we shall hardly ad- 
mire the tact and sagacity of those journalists and politi- 
cians. 

History is an eternal tangle of cross-purposes ; and we 
could not take a clearer case, or rather a more compli- 
cated case, of such a tangle, than the facts lying behind a 
political parallel recently mentioned by many politicians. 
I mean the parallel between the movement for Irish inde- 
pendence and the attempted secession of the Southern 



LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 219 

Confederacy in America. Superficially any one might 
say that the comparison is natural enough ; and that there 
is much in common between the quarrel of the North and 
South in Ireland and the quarrel of the North and South 
in America. In both cases the South was on the whole 
agricultural, the North on the whole industrial. True, 
the parallel exaggerates the position of Belfast; to com- 
plete it we must suppose the whole Federal system to have 
consisted of Pittsburg. In both the side that was more 
successful was felt by many to be less attractive. In both 
the same political terms were used, such as the term 
'Union' and 'Unionism.' An ordinary Englishman comes 
to America, knowing these main lines of American 
history, and knowing that the Americans know the 
similar main lines of Irish history. He knows that there 
are strong champions of Ireland in America ; possibly he 
also knows that there are very genuine champions of 
England in America. By every possible historical anal- 
ogy, he would naturally expect to find the pro-Irish in 
the South and the pro-English in the North. As a matter 
of fact, he finds almost exactly the opposite. He finds 
Boston governed by Irishmen, and Nashville containing 
people more pro-English than Englishmen. He finds 
Virginians not only of British blood, like George 
Washington, but of British opinions almost worthy of 
George the Third. 

But I do not say this, as will be seen in a moment, as 
a criticism of the comparative toryism of the South. I 
say it as a criticism of the superlative stupidity of English 
propaganda. In another chapter, I remark on the need 
for a new sort of English propaganda ; a propaganda that 
should be really English and have some remote reference 
to England. Now if it were a matter of making foreign- 



220 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

ers feel the real humours and humanities of England, 
there are no Americans so able or willing to do it as the 
Americans of the Southern States. As I have already 
hinted, some of them are so loyal to the English human- 
ities, that they think it their duty to defend even the 
English inhumanities. New England is turning into 
New Ireland. But Old England can still be faintly 
traced in Old Dixie. It contains some of the best things 
that England herself has had, and therefore (of course) 
the things that England herself has lost, or is trying to 
lose. But above all, as I have said, there are people in 
these places whose historic memories and family tradi- 
tions really hold them to us, not by alliance but by affec- 
tion. Indeed, they have the affection in spite of the alli- 
ance. They love us in spite of our compliments and 
courtesies and hands across the sea ; all our ambassadorial 
salutations and speeches cannot kill their love. They 
manage even to respect us in spite of the shady Jew 
stockbrokers we send them as English envoys, or the 
'efficient' men, who are sent out to be tactful with foreign- 
ers because they have been too tactless with trades 
unionists. This type of traditional American, North or 
South, really has some traditions connecting him with 
England ; and though he is now in a very small minority, 
I cannot imagine why England should wish to make it 
smaller. England once sympathised with the South. 
The South still sympathises with England. It would 
seem that the South, or some elements in the South, had 
rather the advantage of us in political firmness and fidel- 
ity; but it does not follow that fidelity will stand every 
shock. And at this moment, and in this matter, of all 
things in the world, our political propagandists must try 
to bolster British Imperialism up, by kicking Southern 



LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 221 

Secession when it is down. The English politicians 
eagerly point out that we shall be justified in crushing 
Ireland exactly as Sumner and Stevens crushed the most 
English part of America. It does not seem to occur to 
them that this comparison between the Unionist triumph 
in America and a Unionist triumph in Britain is rather 
hard upon our particular sympathisers, who did not 
triumph. When England exults in Lincoln's victory 
over his foes, she is exulting in his victory over her own 
friends. If her diplomacy continues as delicate and 
chivalrous as it is at present, they may soon be her only 
friends. England will be defending herself at the ex- 
pense of her only defenders. But however this may be, 
it is as well to bear witness to some of the elements of 
my o^wn experience; and I can answer for it, at least, 
that there are some people in the South who will not be 
pleased at being swept into the rubbish-heap of history 
as rebels and ruffians; and who will not, I regret to say, 
by any means enjoy even being classed with Fenians 
and Sinn Feiners. 

Now touching the actual comparison between the con- 
quest of the Confe'deracy and the conquest of Ireland, 
there are, of course, a good many things to be said which 
politicians cannot be expected to understand. Strange 
to say, it is not certain that a lost cause was never worth 
winning; and it would be easy to argue that the world 
lost very much indeed when that particular cause was 
lost. These are not days in which it is exactly obvious 
that an agricultural society was more dangerous than 
an industrial one. And even Southern slavery had this 
one moral merit, that it was decadent; it has this one 
historic advantage, that it is dead. The Northern slav- 
ery, industrial slavery, or what is called wage slavery. 



222 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

is not decaying but increasing; and the end o-f it is not 
yet. But in any case, it would be well for us to realise 
that the reproach of resembling the Confederacy does not 
ring in all ears as an unanswerable condemnation. It is 
scarcely a self-evident or sufficient argument, to some 
hearers, even to prove that the English are as delicate 
and philanthropic as Sherman, still less that the Irish are 
as criminal and lawless as Lee. Nor will it soothe every 
single soul on the American continent to say that the 
English victory in Ireland will be followed by a recon- 
struction, like the reconstruction exhibited in the film 
called 'The Birth of a Nation.* And, indeed, there is a 
further inference from that fine panorama of the exploits 
of the Ku-Klux-Klan. It would be easy, as I say, to 
turn the argument entirely in favour of the Confederacy. 
It would be easy to draw the moral, not that the Southern 
Irish are as wrong as the Southern States, but that the 
Southern States were as right as the Southern Irish. 
But upon the whole, I do not incline to accept the parallel 
in that sense any more than in the opposite sense. For 
reasons I have already given elsewhere, I do believe that 
in the main Abraham Lincoln was right. But right in 
what ? 

If Lincoln was right, he was right in guessing that 
there was not really a Northern nation and a Southern 
nation, but only one American nation. And if he has 
been proved right, he has been proved right by the fact 
that men in the South, as well as the North, do now feel 
a patriotism for that American nation. His wisdom, 
if it really was wisdom, was justified not by his oppo- 
nents being conquered, but by their being converted. 
Now, if the English politicians must insist on this paral- 
lel, they ought to see that the parallel is fatal to them- 



LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 223 

selves. The very test which proved Lincoln right has 
proved them wrong. The very judgment which may 
have justified him quite unquestionably condemns them. 
We have again and again conquered Ireland, and have 
never come an inch nearer to converting Ireland. We 
have had not one Gettysburg, but twenty Gettysburgs; 
but we have had no Union. And that is where, as I 
have remarked, it is relevant to remember that flying 
fantastic vision on the films that told so many people 
what no histories have told them. I occasionally heard 
in America rumours of the local reappearance of the 
Ku-Klux-Klan ; but the smallness and mildness of the 
manifestation, as compared with the old Southern or 
the new Irish case, is alone a sufificient example of the 
exception that proves the rule. To approximate to any 
resemblance to recent Irish events, we must imagine the 
Ku-Klux-Klan riding again in more than the terrors of 
that vision, wild as the wind, white as the moon, terrible 
as an army with banners. If there were really such a re- 
vival of the Southern action, there would equally be a 
revival of the Southern argument. It would be clear 
that Lee was right and Lincoln was wrong; that the 
Southern States were national and were as indestructible 
as nations. If the South were as rebellious as Ireland, 
the North would be as wrong as England. 

But I desire a new English diplomacy that will ex- 
hibit, not the things in which England is wrong but the 
things in which England ia right. And England is 
right in England, just as she is wrong in Ireland; and 
it is exactly that rightness of a real nation in itself that 
it is at once most difificult and most desirable to explain 
to foreigners. Now the Irishman, and to some extent 
the American, has remained alien to England, largely 



224 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

because he does not truly realise that the Englishman 
loves England, still less can he really imagine why the 
Englishman loves England. That is why I insist on the 
stupidity of ignoring and insulting the opinions of those 
few Virginians and other Southerners who really have 
some inherited notion of why Englishmen love England; 
and even love it in something of the same fashion them- 
selves. Politicians who do not know the English spirit 
-when they see it at home, cannot of course be expected 
to recognise it abroad. Publicists are eloquently prais- 
ing Abraham Lincoln, for all the wrong reasons; but 
fundamentally for that worst and vilest of all reasons 
— that he succeeded. None of them seems to have the 
least notion of how to look for England in England; and 
they would see something fantastic in the figure of a 
traveller who found it elsewhere, or anywhere but in New 
England. And it is well, perhaps, that they have not 
yet found England where it is hidden in England; for if 
they found it, they would kill it. 

All I am concerned to consider here is the inevitable 
failure of this sort of Anglo-American propaganda to 
create a friendship. To praise Lincoln as an English- 
man is about as appropriate as if we were praising 
Lincoln as an English town. We |are talking about 
something totally different. And indeed the whole con- 
versation is rather like some such cross-purposes about 
some such word as Lincoln' ; in which one party should 
be talking about the President and the other about the 
cathedral. It is like some wild bewilderment in a farce, 
with one man wondering how a President could have a 
church-spire, and the other wondering how a church 
could have a chin-beard. And the moral is the moral on 
which I would insist everywhere in this book; that the 



LINCOLN AND LOST CAUSES 225 

remedy is to be found in disentangling the two and not 
in entangling them further. You could not produce a 
democrat of the logical type of Lincoln merely out of the 
moral materials that now make up an English cathedral 
town, like that on which Old Tom of Lincoln looks 
down. But on the other hand, it is quite certain that a 
hundred Abraham Lincolns, working for a hundred 
years, could not build Lincoln Cathedral. And the 
farcical allegory of an attempt to make Old Tom and Old 
Abe embrace to the glory of the illogical Anglo-Saxon 
language is but a symbol of something that is always 
being attempted, and always attempted in vain. It is 
not by mutual imitation that the understanding can come. 
It is not by erecting New York sky-scrapers in London 
that New York can learn the sacred significance of the 
towers of Lincoln. It is not by English dukes import- 
ing the daughters of American millionaires that England 
can get any glimpse of the democratic dignity of Ameri- 
can men. I have the best of all reasons for knowing 
that a stranger can be welcomed in America; and just 
as he is courteously treated in the country as a stranger, 
so he should always be careful to treat it as a strange 
land. That sort of imaginative respect, as for something 
different and even distant, is the only beginning of any 
attachment between patriotic peoples. The English trav- 
eller may carry with him at least one word of his own 
great language and literature ; and whenever he is inclined 
to say of anything *This is passing strange,' he may 
remember that it was no inconsiderable Englishman who 
appended to it the answer, 'And therefore as a stranger 
give it welcome.' 



WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 

THERE was recently a highly distinguished gather- 
ing to celebrate the past, present, and especially 
future triumphs of aviation. Some of the most 
brilliant men of the age, such as Mr. H. G. Wells, and 
Mr. J. L. Garvin, made interesting and important 
speeches, and many scientific aviators luminously dis- 
cussed the new science. Among their graceful felici- 
tations and grave and quiet analyses a word was said, or 
a note was struck, which I myself can never hear, even 
in the most harmless after-dinner speech, without an im- 
pulse to leap up and yell, and smash the decanters and 
wreck the dinner-table. 

Long ago, when I was a boy, I heard it with fury ; and 
never since have I been able to understand any free man 
hearing it without fury. I heard it when Bloch, and the 
old prophets of pacifism by panic, preached that war 
would become too horrible for patriots to endure. It 
sounded to me like saying that an instrument of torture 
was being prepared by my dentist, that would finally 
cure me of loving my dog. And I felt it again when all 
these wise and well-meaning persons began to talk about 
the inevitable effect of aviation in bridging the Atlantic, 
and establishing alliance and affection between England 
and America. 

I resent the suggestion that a machine can make me 
bad. But I resent quite equally the suggestion that a 
machine can make me good. It might be the unfortunate 
fact that a coolness had arisen between myself and Mr. 

226 



WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 227 

Fitzarlington Blenkinsop, inhabiting the suburban villa 
and garden next to mine ; and I might even be largely to 
blame for it. But if somebody told me that a new kind 
of lawn-mower had just been invented, of so cunning a 
structure that I should be forced to become a bosom- 
friend of Mr. Blenkinsop whether I Hked it or not, I 
should be very much annoyed. I should be moved to say 
that if that was the only way of cutting my grass I 
would not cut my grass, but continue to cut my neighbour. 
Or suppose the difference were even less defensible; 
suppose a man had suffered from a trifling shindy with 
his wife. And suppose somebody told him that the 
introduction of an entirely new vacuum-cleaner would 
compel him to a reluctant reconciliation with his wife. 
It would be found, I fancy, that human nature abhors 
that vacuum. Reasonably spirited human beings will 
not be ordered about by bicycles and sewing-machines; 
and a healthy man will not be made good, let alone bad, 
by the things he has himself made. I have occasionally 
dictated to a typewriter, but I will not be dictated to by a 
typewriter, even of the newest and most complicated 
mechanism; nor have I ever met a typewriter, however 
complex, which attempted such a tyranny. 

Yet this and nothing else is what is implied in all such 
talk of the aeroplane annihilating distinctions as well as 
distances ; and an international aviation abolishing nation- 
alities. This and nothing else was really implied in one 
speaker's prediction that such aviation will almost neces- 
sitate an Anglo-American friendship. Incidentally, I 
may remark, it is not a true suggestion even in the prac- 
tical and materialistic sense ; and the speaker's phrase re- 
futed the speaker's argument. He said that international 
relations must be more friendly when men can get from 



228 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

England to America in a day. Well, men can already 
get from England to Germany in a day; and the result 
was a mutual invitation of which the formalities lasted 
for five years. Men could get from the coast of England 
to the coast of France very quickly, through nearly all the 
ages during which those two coasts were bristling with 
arms against each other. They could get there very 
quickly when Nelson went down by that Burford Inn to 
embark for Trafalgar; they could get there very quickly 
when Napoleon sat in his tent in that camp at Boulogne 
that filled England with alarums of invasion. Are these 
the amiable and pacific relations which will unite England 
and America, when Englishmen can get to America in a 
day? The shortening of the distance seems quite as 
likely, so far as that argument goes, to facilitate that end- 
less guerilla warfare which raged across the narrow seas 
in the Middle Ages ; when French invaders carried away 
the bells of Rye, and the men of those flats of East Sus- 
sex gloriously pursued and recovered them. I do not 
know whether American privateers, landing at Liverpool, 
would carry away a few of the more elegant factory- 
chimneys as a substitute for the superstitious symbols of 
the past. I know not if the English, on ripe reflection, 
would e^say with any enthusiasm to get them back. But 
anyhow it is anything but self-evident that people cannot 
fight each other because they are near to each other; and 
if it were true, there would never have been any such 
thing as border warfare in the world. As a fact, border 
warfare has often been the one sort of warfare which it 
was most difficult to bring under control. And our own 
traditional position in face of this new logic is somewhat 
disconcerting. We have always supposed ourselves safer 
because we were insular and therefore isolated. We 



WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 229 

have been congratulating ourselves for centuries on hav- 
ing enjoyed- peace because we were cut off from our 
neighbours. And now they are telling us that we shall 
only enjoy peace when we are joined up with our neigh- 
bours. We have pitied the poor nations with frontiers, 
because a frontier only produces fighting; and now we 
are trusting to a frontier as the only thing that will pro- 
duce friendship. But, as a matter of fact, and for a far 
deeper and more spiritual reason a frontier will not pro- 
duce friendship. Only friendliness produces friendship. 
And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the 
thing that produces friendliness. 

But apart from this fallacy about the facts, I feel, as 
I say, a strong abstract anger against the idea, or what 
some would call the ideal. If it were true that men could 
be taught and tamed by machines, even if they were 
taught wisdom or tamed to amiability, I should think it 
the most tragic truth in the world. A man so improved 
would be, in an exceedingly ugly sense, losing his soul to 
save it. But in truth he cannot be so completely coerced 
into good ; and in so far as he is incompletely coerced, he 
is quite as likely to be coerced into evil. Of the financial 
characters who figure as philanthropists and philosophers 
in such cases, it is strictly true to say that their good is 
evil. The light in their bodies is darkness, and the high- 
est objects of such men are the lowest objects of ordinary 
men. Their peace is mere safety, their friendship is mere 
trade; their international friendship is mere international 
trade. The best we can say of that school of capitalism 
is that it will be unsuccessful. It has every other vice, 
but it is not practical. It has at least the impossibility of 
idealism ; and so far as remoteness can carry it, that In- 
ferno is indeed a Utopia. All the visible manifestations 



230 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

of these men are materialistic; but at least their visions 
will not materialise. The worse we suffer; but the best 
we shall at any rate escape. We may continue to endure 
the realities of cosmopolitan capitalism; but we sliall be 
spared its ideals. 

But I am not primarily interested in the plutocrats 
whose vision takes so vulgar a form. I am interested 
in the same thing when it takes a far more subtle form, 
in men of genius and genuine social enthusiasm like Mr. 
H. G. Wells. It would be very unfair to a man like Mr. 
Wells to suggest that in his vision the Englishman and 
the American are to embrace only in the sense of clinging 
to each other in terror. He is a man who understands 
what friendship is, and who knows how to enjoy the mot- 
ley humours of humanity. But the political reconstruc- 
tion which he proposes is too much determined by this old 
nightmare of necessitarianism. He tells us that our 
national dignities and differences must be melted into the 
huge mould of a World State, or else (and I think these 
are almost his own words) we shall be destroyed by the 
instruments and machinery we have ourselves made. 
In effect, men must abandon patriotism or they 
will be murdered by science. After this, surely no one 
can accuse Mr. Wells of an undue tenderness for scientific 
over other types of training. Greek may be a good thing 
or no; but nobody says that if Greek scholarship is carried 
past a certain point, everybody will be torn in pieces like 
Orpheus, or burned up like Semele, or poisoned like Soc- 
rates. Philosophy, theology and logic may or may not 
be idle academic studies; but nobody supposes that the 
study of philosophy, or even of theology, ultimately 
forces its students to manufacture racks and thumb- 
screws against their will; or that even logicians need be 



WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 231 

so alarmingly logical as all that. Science seems to be 
the only branch of study in which people have to be 
waved back from perfection as from a pestilence. But- 
my business is not with the scientific dangers which alarm 
Mr. Wells, but with the remedy he proposes for them ; or 
rather with the relation of that remedy to the foundation 
and the future of America. Now it is not too much to 
say that Mr. Wells finds his model in America. The 
World State is to be the United States of the World. 
He answers almost all objections to the practicability 
of such a peace among states, by pointing out that the 
American States have such a peace, and by adding, truly 
enough, that another turn of history might easily have 
seen them broken up by war. The pattern of the World 
State is to be found in the New World. 

Oddly enough, as it seems to me, he proposes almost 
cosmic conquests for the American Constitution, while 
leaving out the most successful thing in that Constitution. 
The point appeared in answer to a question which many, 
like myself, must have put in this matter; the question 
of despotism and democracy. I cannot understand any 
democrat not seeing the danger of so distant and indirect 
a system of government. It is hard enough anywhere 
to get representatives to represent. It is hard enough to 
get a little town council to fulfil the wishes of a little 
town, even when the townsmen meet the town councillors 
every day in the street, and could kick them down the 
street if they liked. What the same town councillors 
would be Hke if they were ruling all their fellow-creatures 
from the North Pole or the New Jerusalem, is a vision of 
Oriental despotism beyond the towering fancies of Tam- 
berlane. This difficulty in all representative government 
is felt everywhere, and not least in America. But I think 



232 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

that if there is one truth apparent in such a choice of evils, 
it is that monarchy is at least better than oligarchy ; and 
that where we have to act on a large scale, the most genu- 
ine popularity can gather round a particular person like 
a Pope or a President of the United States, or even a 
dictator like Caesar or Napoleon, rather than round a 
more or less corrupt committee which can only be defined 
as an obscure oligarchy. And in that sense any oli- 
garchy is obscure. For people to continue to trust 
twenty-seven men it is necessary, as a preliminary for- 
mality, that people should have heard of them. And 
there are no twenty-seven men of whom everybody has 
heard as everybody in France had heard of Napoleon, as 
all Catholics have heard of the Pope or all Americans 
have heard of the President. I think the mass of ordi- 
nary Americans do really elect their President ; and even 
where they cannot control him at least they watch him, 
and in the long run they judge him, I think, therefore, 
that the American Constitution has a real popular in- 
stitution in the Presidency. But Mr. Wells would appear 
to want the American Constitution without the Pres- 
idency. If I understand his words rightly, he seems to 
want the great democracy without its popular institution. 
Alluding to this danger, that the World State might be 
a world tyranny, he seems to take tyranny entirely in the 
sense of autocracy. He asks whether the President of 
the World State would not be rather too tremendous a 
person and seems to suggest in answer that there need not 
even be any such a person. He seems to imply that the 
committee controlling the planet could meet almost with- 
out any one in the chair, certainly without any one on the 
throne. I cannot imagine anything more manifestly 
made to be a tyranny than such an acephalous aristoc- 



WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 233 

racy. But while Mr. Well's decision seems to me strange, 
his reason for it seems to me still more extraor- 
dinary. 

He suggests that no such dictator will be needed in 
his World State because *there will be no wars and no 
diplomacy.' A World State ought doubtless to go round 
the world ; and going round the world seems to be a good 
training for arguing in a circle. Obviously there will 
be no wars and no war-diplomacy if something has the 
power to prevent them; and we cannot deduce that the 
something will not want any power. It is rather as if 
somebody, urging that the Germans could only be de- 
feated by uniting the Allied commands under Marshal 
Foch, had said that after all it need not offend the British 
Generals because the French supremacy need only be a 
fiction, the Germans being defeated. We should natur- 
ally say that the German defeat would only be a reality 
because the Allied command was not a fiction. So the 
universal peace would only be a reality if the World State 
were not a fiction. And it could not be even a state if it 
were not a government. This argument amounts to say- 
ing, first that the World State will be needed because it 
is strong, and then it may safely be weak because it will 
not be needed. 

Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy. 
I do not say it is incompatible with it ; but any combina- 
tion of the two will be a compromise between the two. 
The only purely popular government is local, and founded 
on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city be- 
cause they know the city; but it will always be an ex- 
ceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to 
rule over ten cities, and these remote and altogether alien 
cities. All Irishmen may know roughly the same sort 



234 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

of things about Ireland; but it is absurd to say they all 
know the same things about Iceland, when they may in- 
clude a scholar steeped in Icelandic sagas or a sailor who 
has been to Iceland. To make all politics cosmopolitan 
is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If your 
political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you 
depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority 
of the people who have been to the Cannibal Islands ; or 
rather' of the still smaller and more select minority who 
have come back. 

Given this difficulty about quite direct democracy over 
large areas, I think the nearest thing to democracy is des- 
potism. At any rate I think it is some sort of more or 
less independent monarchy, such as Andrew Jackson 
created in America. And I believe it is true to say that 
the two men whom the modern world really and almost 
reluctantly regards with impersonal respect, as clothed 
by their office with something historic and honourable, 
are the Pope and the President of the United States. 

But to admire the United States as the United States 
is one thing. To admire them as the World State is 
quite another. The attempt of Mr. Wells to make 
America a sort of model for the federation of all the free 
nations of the earth, though it is international in in- 
tention, is really as narrowly national, in the bad sense, 
as the desire of Mr. Kipling to cover the world with 
British Imperialism, or of Professor Treitschke to cover 
it with Prussian Pan-Germanism. Not being schoolboys, 
we no longer believe that everything can be settled by 
painting the map red. Nor do I believe it can be done 
by painting it blue with white spots, even If they are 
called stars. The insufficiency of British Imperialism 
does not lie In the fact that it has always been applied by 



WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 235 

force of arms. As a matter of fact, it has not. It has 
been effected largely by commerce, by colonisation of 
comparatively empty places, by geographical discovery 
and diplomatic bargain. Whether it be regarded as 
praise or blame, it is certainly the truth that among all the 
things that have called themselves empires, the British 
has been perhaps the least purely military, and has least 
both of the special guilt and the special glory that goes 
with militarism. The insufficiency of British Imperial- 
ism is not that it is imperial, let alone military. The in- 
sufficiency of British Imperialism is that it is British; 
when it is not merely Jewish. It is that just as a man is 
no more than a man, so a nation is no more than a na- 
tion; and any nation is adequate as an international 
model. Any state looks small when it occupies the whole 
earth. Any polity is narrow as soon as it is as wide as 
the world. It would be just the same if Ireland began 
to paint the map green or Montenegro were to paint it 
black. The objection to spreading anything all over 
the world is that, among other things, you have to spread 
it very thin. 

But America, which Mr. Wells takes as a model, is in 
another sense rather a warning. Mr. Wells says very 
truly that there was a moment in history when America 
might well have broken up into independent states like 
those of Europe. He seems to take it for granted that 
it was in all respects an advantage that this was avoided. 
Yet there is surely a case, however mildly we put it, for 
a certain importance in the world still attaching to Europe. 
There are some who find France as interesting as Florida ; 
and who think they can learn as much about history and 
humanity in the marble cities of the Mediterranean as in 
the wooden towns of the Middle West. Europe may 



236 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

have been divided, but it was certainly not destroyed; 
nor has its pecuHar position in the culture of the world 
been destroyed. Nothing has yet appeared capable of 
completely eclipsing it, either in its extension in America 
or its imitation in Japan. But the immediate point here 
is perhaps a more important one. There is now no 
creed accepted as embodying the common sense of all 
Europe, as the Catholic creed was accepted as embodying 
it in mediaeval times. There is no culture broadly su- 
perior to all others, as the Mediterranean culture was su- 
perior to that of the barbarians in Roman times. If 
Europe were united in modem times, it would probably 
be by the victory of one of its types over others, pos- 
sibly over all the others. And when America was uni- 
ted finally in the nineteenth century, it was by the vic- 
tory of one of its types over others. It is not yet cer- 
tain that this victory was a good thing. It is not yet 
certain that the world will be better for the triumph of the 
North over the Southern traditions of America. It 
may yet turn out to be as unfortunate as a triumph of 
the North Germans over the Southern traditions of 
Germany and of Europe. 

The men who will not face this fact are men whose 
minds are not free. They are more crushed by Progress 
than any pietists by Providence. They are not allowed 
to question that whatever has recently happened was all 
for the best. Now Progress is Providence without God. 
That is, it is a theory that everything has always per- 
petually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheis- 
tic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far 
more miraculous than a miracle. If there be no pur- 
pose, or if the purpose permits of human free will, then 
in either case it is almost insanely unlikely that there 



WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 237 

should be in history a period of steady and uninterrupted 
progress ; or in other words a period in which poor be- 
wildered humanity moves amid a chaos of complications, 
without making a single mistake. What has to be ham- 
mered into the heads of most normal newspaper-readers 
to-day is that Man has made a great many mistakes. 
Modern Man has made a great many mistakes. Indeed, 
in the case of that progressive and pioneering character, 
one is sometimes tempted to say that he has made noth- 
ing but mistakes. Calvinism was a mistake, and Capi- 
talism was a mistake, and Teutonism and the flattery 
of the Northern tribes were mistakes. In the French 
the persecution of Catholicism by the politicians was a 
mistake, as they found out in the Great War; when the 
memory gave Irish or Italian Catholics an excuse for 
hanging back. In England the loss of agriculture and 
therefore of food-supply in war, and the power to stand 
a siege, was a mistake. And in America the introduction 
of the negroes was a mistake; but it may yet be found 
that the sacrifice of the Southern white man to them 
was even more of a mistake. 

The reason of this doubt is in one word. We have 
not yet seen the end of the whole industrial experiment; 
and there are already signs of it coming to a bad end. It 
may end in Bolshevism. It is more likely to end in the 
Servile State. Indeed, the two things are not so differ- 
ent as some suppose, and they grow less different every 
day. The Bolshevists have already called in Capitalists 
to help them to crush the free peasants. The Capitalists 
are quite likely to call in Labour leaders to whitewash 
their compromise as social reform or even Socialism. 
The cosmopolitan Jews who are the Communists in the 
East will not find it so very hard to make a bargain with 



238 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

the cosmopolitan Jews who are Capitalists in the West. 
The Western Jews would be willing to admit a nominal 
Socialism. The Eastern Jews have already admitted 
that their Socialism is nominal. It was the Bolshevist 
ileader himself who said, 'Russia is again a Capitalist 
country.' But whoever makes the bargain, and what- 
ever is its precise character, the substance of it will be 
servile. It will be servile in the only rational and reliable 
sense ; that is an arrangement by which a mass of men are 
ensured shelter and livelihood, in return for being sub-, 
jected to a law which obliges them to continue to labour. 
Of course it will not be called the Servile State; it is very 
probable that it will be called the Socialist State. But 
nobody seems to realise how very near all the industrial 
countries are to it. At any moment it may appear in 
the simple form of compulsory arbitration; for compul- 
sory arbitration dealing with private employers is by 
definition slavery. When workmen receive unemploy- 
ment pay, and at the same time arouse more and more 
irritation by going on strike, it may seem very natural 
to give them the unemployment pay for good and forbid 
them the strike for good; and the combination of those 
two things is by definition slavery. And Trotsky can 
beat any Trust magnate as a strike-breaker; for he does 
not even pretend that his compulsory labour is a free 
bargain. If Trotsky and the Trust magnate come to 
a working compromise, that compromise will be a Ser- 
vile State. But it will also be the supreme and by far 
the most constructive and conclusive result of the in- 
dustrial movement in history; of the power of machinery 
or money; of the huge populations of the modern cities; 
of scientific inventions and resources; of all the things 
before which the agricultural society of the Southern 



WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 239 

Confederacy went down. But even those who cannot 
see that commerciaHsm may end in the triumph of slav- 
ery can see that the Northern victory has to a great ex- 
tent ended in the triumph of commercialism. And the 
point at the moment is that this did definitely mean, 
even at the time, the triumph of one American type over 
another American type; just as much as any European 
war might mean the triumph of one European type over 
another. A victory of England over France would be 
a victory of merchants over peasants; and the victory 
of Northerners over Southerners was a victory of mer- 
chants over squires. So that that very unity, which Mr. 
Wells contrasts so favourably with war, was not only it- 
self due to a war, but to a war which had one of the most 
questionable and even perilous of the results of war. 
That result was a change in the balance of power, the pre- 
dominance of a particular partner, the exaltation of a 
particular example, the eclipse of excellent traditions 
when the defeated lost their international influence. In 
short, it made exactly the same sort of difference of which 
we speak when we say that 1870 was a disaster to Europe, 
or that it was necessary to fight Prussia lest she should 
Prussianise the whole world. America would have 
been very different if the leadership had remained with 
Virginia. The world would have been very different 
if America had been very different. It is quite reason- 
able to rejoice that the issue went as it did; indeed, as 
I have explained elsewhere, for other reasons I do on 
the whole rejoice in it. But it is certainly not self-evi- 
dent that it is a matter for rejoicing. One type of 
American state conquered and subjugated another type 
of American state ; and the virtues and value of the latter 
were very largely lost to the world. So if Mr. Wells in- 



240 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

sists on the parallel of a United States of Europe, he 
must accept the parallel of a Civil War of Europe. He 
must suppose that the peasant countries crush the indus- 
trial countries or vice versa; and that one or other of 
them becomes the European tradition to the neglect of 
the other. The situation which seems to satisfy him so 
completely in America is, after all, the situation which 
would result in Europe if the German Empire, let us 
say, had entirely arrested the special development of the 
Slavs; or if the influence of France had really broken off 
short under the blow from Britain.. The Old South had 
qualities of humane civilisation which have not sufficiently 
survived ; or at any rate have not sufficiently spread. It 
is true that the decline of the agricultural South has been 
considerably balanced by the growth of the agricultural 
West. It is true, as I have occasion to emphasise in 
another place, that the West does give the New America 
something that is nearly a normal peasantry, as a pen- 
dant to the industrial towns. But this is not an answer ; 
it is rather an augmentation of the argument. In so far 
as America is saved it is saved by being patchy; and 
would be ruined if the Western patch had the same fate 
as the Southern patch. When all is said, therefore, the 
advantages of American unification are not so certain 
that we can apply them to a world unification. The 
doubt could be expressed in a great many ways and by 
a great many examples. !For that matter, it is already 
being felt that supremacy of the Middle West in politics 
is inflicting upon other localities exactly the sort of local 
injustice that turns provinces into nations struggling to 
be free. It has already inflicted what amounts to re- 
ligious persecution, or the imposition of an alien moral- 
ity, on the wine-growing civilisation of California. In 



WELLS AND THE WORLD STATE 241 

a word, the American system is a good one as govern- 
ments go ; but it is too large, and the world will not be im- 
proved by making it larger. And for this reason alone 
I should reject this second method of uniting England 
and America ; which is not only Americanising England, 
but Americanising everything else. 

But the essential reason is that a type of culture came 
out on top in America and England in the nineteenth cen- 
tury, which cannot and would not be tolerated on top of 
the world. To unite all the systems at the top, without 
improving and simplifying their social organisation be- 
low, would be to tie all the tops of the trees together 
where they rise above a dense and poisonous jungle, and 
make the jungle darker than before. To create such a 
cosmopoHtan political platform would be to build a roof 
above our own heads to shut out the sunlight, on which 
only usurers and conspirators clad in gold could walk 
about in the sun. This is no moment when industrial 
intellectualism can inflict such an artificial oppression 
upon the world. Industrialism itself is coming to see 
dark days, and its future is very doubtful. It is split 
from end to end with strikes and struggles for economic 
life, in which the poor not only plead that they are starv- 
ing, but even the rich can only plead that they are bank- 
rupt. The peasantries are growing not only more pros- 
perous but more politically effective; the Russian moujik 
has held up the Bolshevist Government of Moscow and 
Petersburg; a huge concession has been made by Eng- 
land to Ireland; the League of Nations has decided for 
Poland against Prussia. It is not certain that indus- 
trialism will not wither even in its own field ; it is certain 
that its intellectual ideas will not be allowed to cover 
every field; and this sort of cosmopolitan culture is one 



242 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

of its ideas. Industrialism itself may perish; or on the 
other hand industrialism itself may survive, by some 
searching and scientific reform that will really guarantee 
economic security to all. It may really purge itself of 
the accidental maladies of anarchy and famine; and con- 
tinue as a machine, but at least as a comparatively clean 
and humanely shielded machine; at any rate no longer 
as a man-eating machine. Capitalism may clear itself 
of its worst corruptions by such reform as is open to it; 
by creating humane and healthy conditions for labour, 
and setting the labouring classes to work under a lucid 
and recognised law. It may make Pittsburg one vast 
model factory for all who will model themselves upon fac- 
tories; and may give to all men and women in its em- 
ployment a clear social status in which they can be con- 
tented and secure. And on the day when that social se- 
curity is established for the masses, when industrial cap- 
italism has achieved this larger and more logical organ- 
isation and found peace at last, a strange and shadowy 
and ironic triumph, like an abstract apology, will surely 
hover over all those graves in the Wilderness where lay 
the bones of so many gallant gentlemen; men who had 
also from their youth known and upheld such a social 
stratification, who had the courage to call a spade a spade 
and a slave a slave. 



A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 

THE aim of this book, if it has one, is to suggest 
this thesis; that the very worst way of helping 
Anglo-American friendship is to be an Anglo- 
American. There is only one thing lower, of course, 
which is being an Anglo-Saxon, It is lower, because 
at least Englishmen do exist and Americans do exist; 
and it may be possible, though repulsive, to imagine an 
American and an Englishman in some way blended to- 
gether. But if Angles and Saxons ever did exist, they 
are all fortunately dead now ; and the wildest imagination 
cannot form the weakest idea of what sort of monster 
would be made of mixing one with the other. But my 
thesis is that the whole hope, and the only hope, lies not 
in mixing two things together, but rather in cutting them 
very sharply asunder. That is the only way in which 
two things can succeed sufficiently in getting outside each 
other to appreciate and admire each other. So long as 
they are different and yet supposed to be the same, 
there can be nothing but a divided mind and a staggering 
balance. It may be that in the first twilight of time man 
and woman walked about as one quadruped. But if they 
did, I am sure it was a quadruped that reared and bucked 
and kicked up its heels. Then the flaming sword of 
some angel divided them^ and they fell in love with each 
other. 

Should the reader require an example a little more 
within historical range, or a little more subject to critical 
tests, than the above prehistoric anecdote (which I need 

243 



244 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

not say was revealed to me in a vision) it would be easy 
enough to supply them both in a hypothetical and a his- 
torical form. It is obvious enough in a general way 
that if we begin to subject diverse countries to an identi- 
cal test, there will not only be rivalry, but what is far 
more deadly and disastrous, superiority. If we institute 
a competition between Holland and Switzerland as to the 
relative grace and agility of their mountain guides, it will 
be clear that the decision is disproportionately easy; it 
will also be clear that certain facts about the configura- 
tion of Holland have escaped our international eye. If 
we establish a comparison between them in skill and 
industry in the art of building dykes against the sea, it 
will be equally clear that the injustice falls the other way; 
it will also be clear that the situation of Switzerland on 
the map has received insufficient study. In both cases 
there will not only be rivalry but very unbalanced and 
unjust rivalry; in both cases, therefore, there will not 
only be enmity but very bitter or insolent enmity. But 
so long as the two are sharply divided there can be no 
enmity because there can be no rivalry. Nobody can ar- 
gue about whether the Swiss climb mountains better than 
the Dutch build dykes; just as nobody can argue about 
whether a triangle is more triangular than a circle is 
round. 

This fancy example is alphabetically and indeed arti- 
ficially simple; but, having used it for convenience, I 
could easily give similar examples not of fancy but of 
fact. I had occasion recently to attend the Christmas 
festivity of a club in London for the exiles of one of the 
Scandinavian nations. When I entered the room the 
first thing that struck my eye, and greatly raised my 
spirits, was that the room was dotted with the colours of 



A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 245 

peasant costumes and the specimens of peasant crafts- 
manship. There were, of course, other costumes and 
other crafts in evidence; there were men dressed Hke 
myself (only better) in the garb of the modern middle 
classes; there was furniture like the furniture of any 
other room in London. Now, according to the ideal 
formula of the ordinary internationalist, these things 
that we had in common ought to have moved me to a 
sense of the kinship of all civilisation. I ought to have 
felt that as the Scandinavian gentleman wore a collar 
and tie, and I also wore a collar and tie, we were brothers 
and nothing could come between us. I ought to have 
felt that we were standing for the same principles of 
truth because we were wearing the same pair of trousers; 
or rather, to speak with more precision, similar pairs 
of trousers. Anyhow, the pair of trousers, that cloven 
pennon, ought to have floated in fancy over my head as 
the banner of Europe or the League of Nations. I am 
constrained to confess that no such rush of emotions 
overcame me; and the topic of trousers did not float 
across my mind at all. So far as those things were 
concerned, I might have remained in a mood of mortal 
enmity, and cheerfully shot or stabbed the best-dressed 
gentleman in the room. Precisely what did warm my 
heart with an abrupt affection for that northern nation 
was the very thing that is utterly and indeed lamentably 
lacking in my own nation. It was something corre- 
sponding to the one great gap in English history, corre- 
sponding to the one great blot on English civilisation. It 
was the spiritual presence of a peasantry, dressed accord- 
ing to its own dignity, and expressing itself by its own 
creations. 

The sketch of America left by Charles Dickens is gen- 



246 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

erally regarded as something which is either to be used 
as a taunt or covered with an apology. Doubtless it was 
unduly critical, even of the America of that day; yet 
curiously enough it may well be the text for a true rec- 
onciliation at the present day. It is true that in this, 
as in other things, the Dickensian exaggeration is itself 
exaggerated. It is also true that, while it is over-em- 
phasised, it is not allowed for. Dickens tended too much 
to describe the United States as a vast lunatic asylum; 
but partly because he had a natural inspiration and imag- 
ination suited to the description of lunatic asylums. As 
it was his finest poetic fancy that created a lunatic over 
the garden wall, so it was his fancy that created a lunatic 
over the western sea. To read some of the complaints, 
one would fancy that Dickens had deliberately invented 
a low and farcical America to be a contrast to his high 
and exalted England. It is suggested that he showed 
America as full of rowdy bullies like Hannibal Chollop, 
or as ridiculous wind-bags like Elijah Pogram, while 
England was full of refined and sincere spirits like Jonas 
Chuzzlewit, Chevy Slime, Montague Tigg, and Mr. Peck- 
sniff. If Martin Chuzzlewit makes America a lunatic 
asylum, what in the world does it make England? We 
can only say a criminal lunatic asylum. The truth is, of 
course, that Dickens so described them because he had a 
genius for that sort of description; for the making of 
almost maniacal grotesques of the same type as Quilp 
or Fagin. He made these Americans absurd because he 
was an artist in absurdity ; and no artist can help finding 
hints everywhere for his own peculiar art. In a word, 
he created a laughable Pogram for the same reason 
that he created a laughable Pecksniff; and that was 
only because no other creature could have created them. 



A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 247 

It is often said that we learn to love the characters in 
romances as if they were characters in real life. I wish 
we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we 
love the characters in romances. There are a great many- 
human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and 
even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them 
as people in a story. Martin Chicszlewit is itself indeed an 
unsatisfactory and even unfortunate example; for it is, 
among its author's other works, a rather unusually harsh 
and hostile story. I do not suggest that we should feel 
towards an American friend that exact shade or tint of 
tenderness that we feel towards Mr. Hannibal Chollop. 
Our enjoyment of the foreigner should rather resemble 
our enjoyment of Pickwick than our enjoyment of Peck- 
sniff. But there i^ this amount of appropriateness even 
in the particular example ; that Dickens did show in both 
countries how men can be made amusing to each other. 
So far the point is not that he made fun of America, but 
that he got fun out of America. And, as I have already 
pointed out, he applied exactly the same method of 
selection and exaggeration to England. In the other 
English stories, written in a more amiable mood, he 
applied it in a more amiable manner; but he could apply 
it to an American too, when he was writing in that mood 
and manner. We can see it in the witty and withering 
criticism delivered by the Yankee traveller in the musty 
refreshment room of Mugby Junction ; a genuine example 
of a genuinely American fun and freedom satirising a 
genuinely British stuffiness and snobbery. Nobody ex- 
pects the American traveller to admire the refreshments at 
Mugby Junction ; but he might admire the refreshment at 
one of the Pickwickian inns, especially if it contained 
Pickwick. Nobody expects Pickwick to like Pogram; 



248 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

but he might like the American who made fun of Mugby 
Junction. But the point is that, while he supported him 
in making fun, he would also think him funny. The two 
comic characters could admire each other, but they would 
also be amused at each other. And the American would 
think the Englishman funny because he was English; 
and a very good reason too. The Englishman would 
think the American amusing because he was American; 
nor can I imagine a better ground for his amusement. 

Now many will debate on the psychological possibility 
of such a friendship founded on reciprocal ridicule, or 
rather on a comedy of comparisons. But I will say of 
this harmony of humours what Mr. H. G. Wells says 
of his harmony of states in the unity of his World State. 
If it can be truly impossible to have such a peace, then 
there is nothing possible except war. If we cannot have 
friends in this fashion, then we shall sooner or later 
have enemies in some other fashion. There is no hope 
in the pompous impersonalities of internationalism. 

And this brings us to the real and relevant mistake of 
Dickens. It was not in thinking his Americans funny, 
but in thinking them foolish because they were funny. 
In this sense it will be noticed that Dickens's American 
sketches are almost avowedly superficial; they are de- 
scriptions of public life and not private life. Mr. Jeffer- 
son Brick had no private life. But Mr. Jonas Chuzzle- 
wit undoubtedly had a private life; and even kept some 
parts of it exceeding private. Mr. Pecksniff was also a 
domestic character; so was Mr. Quilp. Mr. Pecksniff 
and Mr. Quilp had slightly different ways of surprising 
their families; Mr. Pecksniff by playfully observing 
*Boh!' when he came home; Mr. Quilp by coming 
home at all. But we can form no picture of how Mr. 



A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 249 

Hannibal Chollop playfully surprised his family; possi- 
bly by shooting at them ; possibly by not shooting at them. 
We can only say that he would rather surprise us by 
having a family at all. We do not know how the 
Mother of the Modern Gracchi managed the Modem 
Gracchi; for her maternity was rather a public than 
private office. We have no romantic moonlit scenes of 
the love-making of Elijah Pogram, to balance against 
the love story of Seth Pecksniff. These figures are all 
in a special sense theatrical; all facing one way and lit 
up by a public limelight. Their ridiculous characters are 
detachable from their real characters, if they have any 
real characters. And the author might perfectly well 
be right about what is ridiculous, and wrong about what 
is real. He might be as right in smiling at the Pograms 
and the Bricks as in smiling at the Pickwicks and the 
Boffins. And he might still be as wrong in seeing Mr. 
Pogram as a hypocrite as the great Buzfuz was wrong 
in seeing Mr. Pickwick as a monster of revolting heart- 
lessness and systematic villainy. He might still be as 
wrong in thinking Jefferson Brick a charlatan and a 
cheat as was that great disciple of Lavater, Mrs. Wilfer, 
in tracing every wrinkle of evil cunning in the face of 
Mrs. Boffin. For Mr. Pickwick's spectacles and gaiters 
and Mrs. Boffin's bonnets and boudoir are after all super- 
ficial jokes; and might be equally well seen whatever 
we saw beneath them. A man may smile and smile and 
be a villain; but a man may also make us smile and 
not be a villain. He may make us smile and not even be a 
fool. He may make us roar with laughter and be an 
exceedingly wise man. 

Now that is the paradox of America which Dickens 
never discovered. Elijah Pogram was far more fantas- 



250 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

tic than his satirist thought; and the most grotesque 
feature of Brick and ChoUop was hidden from him. 
The really strange thing was that Pogram probably did 
say, 'Rough he may be. So air our bars. Wild he may 
be. So air our buffalers/ and yet was a perfectly intelli- 
gent and public-spirited citizen while he said it. The 
extraordinary thing is that Jefferson Brick may really 
have said, 'The libation of freedom must sometimes be 
quaffed in blood/ and yet Jefferson Brick may have 
served freedom, resisting unto blood. There really has 
been a florid school of rhetoric in the United States 
which has made it quite possible for serious and sensible 
men to say such things. It is amusing simply as a differ- 
ence of idiom or costume is always amusing; just as Eng- 
lish idiom and English costume are amusing to Ameri- 
cans. But about this kind of difference there can be no 
kind of doubt. So sturdy not to say stuffy a materialist 
as Ingersoll could say of so shoddy not to say shady a 
financial politician as Blaine, 'Like an armed warrior, 
like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine strode down the 
hall of Congress, and flung his spear full and true at the 
shield of every enemy of his country and every traducer 
of his fair name.' Compared with that, the passage 
about bears and buffaloes, which Mr. Pogram delivered 
in defense of the defaulting post-master, is really a very 
reasonable and appropriate statement. For bears and 
buffaloes are wild and rough and in that sense free ; while 
plumed knights do not throw their lances about like the 
assegais of Zulus. And the defaulting post-master was 
at least as good a person to praise in such a fashion as 
James G. Blaine of the Little Rock Railway. But any- 
body who treated Ingersoll or Blaine merely as a fool 



A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 251 

and a figure of fun would have very rapidly found out 
his mistake. But Dickens did not know Brick or ChoUop 
long enough to find out his mistake. It need not be 
denied that, even after a full understanding, he might 
still have found things to smile at or to criticise. I do 
not insist on his admitting that Hannibal Chollop was 
as great a hero as Hannibal, or that Elijah Pogram was as 
true a prophet as Elijah. But I do say very seriously 
that they had something about their atmosphere and 
situation that made possible a sort of heroism and 
even a sort of prophecy that were really less natural at 
that period in that Merry England whose comedy and 
common sense we sum up under the name of Dickens. 
When we joke about the name of Hannibal Chollop, we 
might remember of what nation was the general who 
dismissed his defeated soldiers at Appomatox with 
words which the historian has justly declared to be 
worthy of Hannibal: *We have fought through this war 
together. I have done my best for you.' It is not fair to 
forget Jefferson, or even Jefferson Davis, entirely in 
favour of Jefferson Brick. 

For all these three things, good, bad, and indifferent, 
go together to form something that Dickens missed, 
merely because the England of his time most disastrously 
missed it. In this case, as in every case, the only way 
to measure justly the excess of a foreign country is to 
measure the defect of our own country. For in this 
matter the human mind is the victim of a curious little 
unconscious trick, the cause of nearly all international 
dislikes. A man treats his own faults as original sin 
and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of 
Adam. He supposes that men have then added their 



252 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of 
his own private vices. It would astound him to realise 
that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, 
avoided his vices as well as his virtues. His own faults 
are things with which he is so much at home that he at 
once forgets and assumes them abroad. He is so faintly 
conscious of them in himself that he is not even conscious 
of the absence of them in other people. He assumes 
that they are there so that he does not see tliat they are 
not there. The Englishman takes it for granted that a 
Frenchman will have all the English faults. Then he 
goes on to be seriously angry with the Frenchman for 
having dared to complicate them by the French faults. 
The notion that the Frenchman has the French faults 
and not the English faults is a paradox too wild to cross 
his mind. 

He is like an old Chinaman who should laugh at Euro- 
peans for wearing ludicrous top-hats and curling up their 
pig-tails inside them ; because obviously all men have pig- 
tails, as all monkeys have tails. Or he is like an old 
Chinese lady who should justly deride the high-heeled 
shoes of the West, considering them a needless addition 
to the sufficiently tight and secure bandaging of the foot ; 
for, of course, all women bind up their feet, as all women 
bind up their hair. What these Celestial thinkers would 
not think of, or allow for, is the wild possibility that we 
do not have pig-tails although we do have top-hats, or 
that our ladies are not silly enough to have Chinese feet, 
though they are silly enough to have high-heeled shoes. 
Nor should we necessarily have come an inch nearer to 
the Chinese extravagances even if the chimney-pot hat 
rose higher than a factory chimney or the high heels had 



A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 253 

evolved into a sort of stilts. By the same fallacy the 
Englishman will not only curse the French peasant as a 
miser, but will also try to tip him as a beggar. That is, 
he will first complain of the man having the surliness of 
an independent man, and then accuse him of having the 
servility of a dependent one. Just as the hypothetical 
Chinaman cannot believe that we have top-hats but not 
pig-tails, so the Englishman cannot believe that peasants 
are not snobs even when they are savages. Or he sees 
that a Paris paper is violent and sensational; and then 
supposes that some millionaire owns twenty such papers 
and runs them as a newspaper trust. Surely the Yellow 
Press is present everywhere to paint the map yellow, as 
the British Empire to paint it red. It never occurs to 
such a critic that the French paper is violent because it is 
personal, and personal because it belongs to a real and 
responsible person, and not to a ring of nameless million- 
aires. It is a pamphlet, and not an anonymous pamphlet. 
In a hundred other cases the same truth could be illus- 
trated ; the situation in which the black man first assumes 
that all mankind is black, and then accuses the rest of 
the artificial vice of painting their faces red and yellow, 
or the hypocrisy of white-washing themselves after the 
fashion of whited sepulchers. The particular case of 
it now before us is that of the English misunderstanding 
of America; and it is based, as in all these cases, on the 
English misunderstanding of England. 

For the truth is that England has suffered of late from 
not having enough of the free shooting of Hannibal 
Chollop ; from not understanding enough that the libation 
of freedom must sometimes be quaffed in blood. The 
prosperous Englishman will not admit this; but then 



254 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

the prosperous Englishman will not admit that he has suf- 
fered from anything. That is what he is suffering from. 
Until lately at least he refused to realise that nmny of his 
modern habits had been bad habits, the worst of them 
being contentment. For all the real virtue in content- 
ment evaporates, when the contentment is only satisfac- 
tion and the satisfaction is only self-satisfaction. Now 
it is perfectly true that America and not England has seen 
the most obvious and outrageous official denials of liberty. 
But it is equally true that it has seen the most obvious 
flouting of such official nonsense, far more obvious than 
any similar evasions in England. And nobody who 
knows the subconscious violence of the American charac- 
ter would ever be surprised if the weapons of Chollop 
began to be used in that most lawful lawlessness. It is 
perfectly true that the libation of freedom must some- 
times be drunk in blood, and never more (one would 
think) than when mad millionaires forbid it to be drunk 
in beer. But America, as compared with England, is the 
country where one can still fancy men obtaining the liba- 
tion of beer by the libation of blood. Vulgar plutocracy 
is almost omnipotent in both countries ; but I think there 
is now more kick of reaction against it in America than 
in England. The Americans may go mad when they 
make laws ; but they recover their reason when they dis- 
obey them. I wish I could believe that there was as 
much of that destructive repentance in England; as indeed 
there certainly was when Cobbett wrote. It faded gradu- 
ally like a dying fire through the Victorian era; and it 
was one of the very few realities that Dickens did not 
understand. But any one who does understand it will 
know that the days of Cobbett saw the last lost fight for 
English democracy; and that if he had stood at that turn- 



A NEW MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT 255 

ing of the historic road, he would have wished a better 
fate to the frame-breakers and the fury against the first 
machinery, and luck to the Luddite fires. 

Anyhow, what is wanted is a new Martin Chuzzelwit, 
told by a wiser Mark Tapley. It is typical of something 
sombre and occasionally stale in the mood of Dickens 
when he wrote that book, that the comic servant is not 
really very comic. Mark Tapley is a very thin shadow 
of Sam Weller. But if Dickens had written it in a hap- 
pier mood, there might have been a truer meaning in 
Mark Tapley's happiness. For it is true that this illogi- 
cal good humour amid unreason and disorder is one of 
the real virtues of the English people. It is the real 
advantage they have in that adventure all over the world, 
which they were recently and reluctantly induced to call 
an Empire, That receptive ridicule remains with them 
as a secret pleasure when they are colonists — or convicts. 
Dickens might have written another version of the great 
romance, and one in which America was really seen gaily 
by Mark instead of gloomily by Martin. Mark Tapley 
might really have made the best of America. Then 
America would have lived and danced before us like Pick- 
wick's England, a fairyland of happy lunatics and lovable 
monsters, and we might still have sympathised as much 
with the rhetoric of Lafayette Kettle as with the rhetoric 
of Wilkins Micawber, or with the violence of Chollop as 
with the violence of Boythorn. That new Martin Chuz- 
zlewit will never be written; and the loss of it is more 
tragic than the loss of Edwin Drood. But every man 
who has travelled in America has seen glimpses and epi- 
sodes in that untold tale; and far away on the Red- 
Indiart frontiers or in the hamlets in the hills of Pennsyl- 
vania, there are people whom I met for a few hours or a 



256 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

few moments, whom I none the less sincerely admire and 
honour because I cannot but smile as I think of them. But 
the converse is also true ; they have probably forgotten me; 
but if they remember they laugh. 



THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 

I SUGGEST that diplomatists of the internationaHst 
school should spend some of their money on staging 
farces and comedies of cross-purposes, founded on 
the curious and prevalent idea that England and Amer- 
ica have the same language. I know, of course, that we 
both inherit the glorious tongue of Shakespeare, not to 
mention the tune of the musical glasses; but there have 
been moments <when I thought that if we spoke Greek 
and they spoke Latin we might understand each other 
better. For Greek and Latin are at least fixed, while 
American at least is still very fluid. I do not know the 
American language, and therefore I do not claim to dis- 
tinguish between the American language and the Ameri- 
can slang. But I know that highly theatrical develop- 
ments might follow on taking the words as part of the 
English slang or the English language. I have already 
given the example of calling a person 'a regular guy,' 
which in the States is a graceful expression of respect 
and esteem, but which on the stage, properly handled, 
might surely lead the way towards a divorce or duel or 
something lively. Sometimes coincidence merely clinches 
a mistake, as it often clinches a misprint. Every proof- 
reader knows that the worst misprint is not that which 
makes nonsense but that which makes sense; not 
that which is obviously wrong but that which is hid- 
eously right. He who has essayed to write 'he got the 
book,' and has found it rendered mysteriously as 'he got 
the boob' is pensively resigned. It is when it is rendered 

257 



258 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

quite lucidly as *he got the boot' that he is moved to a 
more passionate mood of regret. I have had conver- 
sations in which this sort of accident would have wholly 
misled me, if another accident had not come to the res- 
cue. An American friend of mine was telling me of his 
adventures as a cinema-producer down in the south-west 
where real Red Indians were procurable. He said th-^t 
certain Indians were 'very bad actors.' It passed for me 
as a very ordinary remark on a very ordinary or natural 
deficiency. It would hardly seem a crushing criticism to 
say that some wild Arab chieftain was not very good at 
imitating a farmyard ; or that the Grand Llama of Thibet 
was rather clumsy at making paper boats. But the re- 
mark might be natural in a man travelling in paper 
boats, or touring with an invisible farmyard for his 
menagerie. As my friend was a cinema-producer, I 
supposed he meant that the Indians were bad cinema ac- 
tors. But the phrase has really a high and austere moral 
meaning, which my levity had wholly missed. A bad 
actor means a man whose actions are bad or morally rep- 
rehensible. So that I might have embraced a Red 
Indian who was dripping with gore, or covered with 
atrocious crimes, imagining there was nothing the matter 
with him beyond a mistaken choice of the theatrical pro- 
fession. Surely there are here the elements of a play, 
not to mention a cinema play. Surely a New England 
village maiden might find herself among the wigwams 
in the power of the formidable and fiendish Little Blue 
Bison, merely through her mistaken sympathy with his 
financial failure as a Film Star. The notion gives me 
glimpses of all sorts of dissolving views of primeval 
forests and flamboyant theatres; but this impulse of ir- 
relevant theatrical production must be curbed. There is 



THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 259 

one example, however, of this complication of language 
actually used in contrary senses, about which the same 
figure can be used to illustrate a more serious fact. 

Suppose that, in such an international interlude, an 
English girl and an American girl are talking about the 
fiance of the former, who is coming to call. The English 
girl will be haughty and aristocratic (on the stage), the 
American girl will of course have short hair and skirts 
and will be cynical; Americans being more completely 
free from cynicism than any people in the world. It is 
the great glory of Americans that they are not cynical; 
for that matter, English aristocrats are hardly ever 
haughty ; they understand the game much better than that. 
But on the stage, anyhow, the American girl may say, re- 
ferring to her friend's fiance, with a cynical wave of the 
cigarette, 'I suppose he's bound to come and see you.* 
And at this the blue blood of the Vere de Veres will boil 
over; the English lady will be deeply wounded and in- 
sulted at the suggestion that her lover only comes to see 
her because he is forced to do so. A staggering stage 
quarrel will then ensue, and things will goT from bad to 
worse ; until the arrival of an Interpreter who can talk both 
English and American. He stands between the two 
ladies waving two pocket dictionaries, and explains the 
error on which the quarrel turns. It is very simple ; like 
the seed of all tragedies. In English 'he is bound to 
come and see you' means that he is obliged or constrained 
to come and see you. In American it does; not. In 
American it means that he is bent on coming to see you, 
that he is irrevocably resolved to do so, and will sur- 
mount any obstacle to do it. The two young ladies will 
then embrace as the curtain falls. 

Now when I was lecturing in America I was often 



26o WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

told, in a radiant and congratulatory manner, that such 
and such a person was bound to come and hear me 
lecture. It seemed a very cruel form of conscription, 
and I could not understand what authority could have 
made it compulsory. In the course of discovering my 
error, however, I thought I began to understand certain 
American ideas and instincts that lie behind this Amer- 
ican idiom. For as I have urged before, and shall often 
urge again, the road to international friendship is 
through really understanding jokes. It is in a sense 
through taking jokes seriously. It is quite legitimate to 
laugh at a man who walks down the street in three white 
hats and a green dressing gown, because it is unfamiliar; 
but after all the man has some reason for what he does ; 
and until we know the reason we do not understand the 
story, or even understand the joke. So the outlander 
will always seem outlandish in custom or costume; but 
serious relations depend on our getting beyond the fact 
of difference to the things wherein it differs. A good 
symbolical figure for all this may be found among the 
people who say, perhaps with a self -revealing simplicity, 
that they are bound to go to a lecture. 

If I were asked for a single symbolic figure summihg 
up the whole of what seems eccentric and interesting 
about America to an Englishman, I should be satisfied 
to select that one lady who complained of Mrs. Asquith's 
lecture and wanted her money back. I do not mean 
that she was typically American in complaining ; far from 
it. I, for one, have a great and guilty knowledge of all 
that amiable American audiences will endure without 
complaint. I do not mean that she was typically Amer- 
ican in wanting her money; quite the contrary. That 
sort of American spends money rather than hoards it; 



THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 261 

and when we convict them of vulgarity we acquit them of 
avarice. Where she was typically American, summing 
up a truth individual and indescribable in any other way, 
is that she used these words: 'I've risen from a sick-bed 
to come and hear her, and I want my money back.' 

The element in that which really amuses an English^ 
man is precisely the element which, properly analysed, 
ought to make him admire an American. But my point 
is that only by going through the amusement can he 
reach the admiration. The amusement is in the vision 
of a tragic sacrifice for what is avowedly a rather trivial 
object. Mrs. Asquith is a candid lady of considerable 
humour; and I feel sure she does not regard the experi- 
ence of hearing her read her diary as an ecstasy for 
which the sick should thus suffer martyrdom. She also 
is English; and had no other claim but to amuse Amer- 
icans and possibly to be amused by them. This being 
so, it is rather as if somebody said, 'I have risked my 
life in fire and pestilence to find my way to the music 
hall,' or, T have fasted forty days in the wilderness sus-) 
tained by the hope of seeing Totty Toddles do her new 
dance.' And there is something rather more subtle in- 
volved here. There is something in an Englishman 
which would make him feel faintly ashamed of saying 
that he had fasted to hear Totty Toddles, or risen from 
a sick-bed to hear Mrs. Asquith. He would feel it was 
undignified to confess that he had wanted mere amuse- 
ment so much ; and perhaps that he had wanted anything 
so much. He would not like, so to speak, to be seen 
rushing down the street after Totty Toddles, or after 
Mrs. Asquith, or perhaps after anybody. But there is 
something in it distinct from a mere embarrassment at 
admitting enthusiasm. He might admit the enthusiasm 



262 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

if the object seemed to justify it; he might perfectly well 
be serious about a serious thing. But he cannot under- 
stand a person being proud of serious sacrifices for what 
is not a serious thing. He does not like to admit that 
a little thing can excite him; that he can lose his breath 
in running, or lose his balance in reaching, after some- 
thing that might be called silly. 

Now that is where the American is fundamentally 
different. To him the enthusiasm itself is meritorious. 
To him the excitement itself is dignified. He counts it 
a part of his manhood to fast or fight or rise from a bed 
of sickness for something, or possibly for anything. His 
ideal is not to be a lock that only a worthy key can open, 
but a 'live wire* that anything can touch or anybody can 
use. In a word, there is a difference in the very defi- 
nition of virility and therefore of virtue. A live wire is 
not only active, it is also sensitive. Thus sensibility be- 
comes actually a part of virility. Something more is 
involved than the vulgar simplification of the American 
as the irresistible force and the Englishman as the im- 
movable post. As a fact, those who speak of such things 
nowadays generally mean by something irresistible some- 
thing simply immovable, or at least something unalter- 
able, motionless even in motion, like a cannon ball; for 
a cannon ball is as dead as a cannon. Prussian mili- 
tarism was praised in that way — until it met a French 
force of about half its size on the banks of the Marne. 
But that is not what an American means by energy; 
that sort of Prussian energy is only monotony without 
repose. American energy is not a soulless machine; for 
it is the whole point that he puts his soul into it. It is 
a very small box for so big a thing; but it is not an 



THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 263 

empty box. But the point is that he is not only proud 
of his energy, he is proud of his excitement. He is not 
ashamed of his emotion, of the fire or even the tear in 
him manly eye, when he tells you that the great wheel 
of his machine breaks four billion butterflies an hour. 

That is the point about American sport; that it is not 
in the least sportive. It is because it is not very sportive 
that we sometimes say it is not very sporting. It has the 
vices of a religion. It has all the paradox of original 
sin in the service of aboriginal faith. It is sometimes 
untruthful because it is sincere. It is sometimes treach- 
erous because it is loyal. Men lie and cheat for it as they 
lied for their lords in a feudal conspiracy, or cheated for 
their chieftains in a Highland feud. We may say that 
the vassal readily committed treason; but it is equally 
true that he readily endured torture. So does the 
American athlete endure torture. Not only the self-sacri- 
fice buti'the solemnity of the American athlete is like that 
of the American Indian. The athletes in the States have 
the attitude of the athletes among the Spartans, the great 
historical nation without a sense of humour. They suffer 
an ascetic regime not to be matched in any monasticism 
and hardly in any militarism. If any tradition of these 
things remains in a saner age, they will probably be re- 
membered as a mysterious religious order of fakirs or 
dancing dervishes, who shaved their heads and fasted 
in honour of Hercules or Caster and Pollux. And that 
is really the spiritual atmosphere though the Gods have 
vanished; and the religion is subconscious and therefore 
irrational. For the problem of the modern world is that 
is has continued to be religious when it has ceased to be 
rational. Americans really would starve to win a cocoa- 



264 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

nut shy. They "would fast or bleed to win a race of 
paper boats on a pond. They would rise from a sick-bed 
to listen to Mrs. Asquith. 

But it is the real reason that interests me here. It 
is certainly not that Americans are so stupid as not to 
know that cocoa-nuts are only cocoa-nuts and paper boats 
only made of paper. Americans are, on an average, 
rather more intelligent than Englishmen; and they are 
well aware that Hercules is a myth and that Mrs. Asquith 
is something of a mythologist. It is not that they do not 
know that the object is small in itself; it is that they do 
really believe that the enthusiasm is great in itself. They 
admire people for being impressionable. They admire 
people for being excited. An American so struggling 
for some disproportionate trifle (like one of my lectures) 
really feels in a mystical way that he is right, because 
it is his whole morality to be keen. So long as he wants 
something very much, whatever it is, he feels he has 
his conscience behind him, and the common sentiment of 
society behind him, and God and the whole universe be- 
hind him. Wedged on one leg in a hot crowd at a 
■trivial lecture, he has self-respect; his dignity, is at rest. 
That is what he means when he says he is bound to 
come to the lecture. 

Now the Englishman is fond of occasional larks. 
But these things are not larks; nor are they occasional. 
It is the essential of the Englishman's lark that he should 
think it a lark; that he should laugh at it even when he 
does it. Being English myself, I like it ; but being Eng- 
lish myself, I know it is connected with weaknesses as 
well as merits. In its irony there is condescension and 
therefore embarrassment. This patronage is allied to the 
patron, and the patron is allied to the aristocratic tradi- 



THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 265 

tion of society. The larks are a variant of laziness be- 
cause of leisure; and the leisure is a variant of the secur- 
ity and even supremacy of the gentleman. When an 
undergraduate at Oxford smashes half a hundred win- 
dows, he is well aware that the incident is merely a 
trifle. He can be trusted to explain to his parents and 
guardians that it was merely a trifle. He does not say, 
even in the American sense, that he was bound to smash 
the windows. He does not say that he had risen from a 
sick-bed to smash the windows. He does not especially 
think he has risen at all; he knows he has descended 
(though with delight, like one diving or sliding down the 
banisters) to something flat and farcical and full of the 
English taste for the bathos. He has collapsed into 
something entirely commonplace; though the owners of 
the windows may possibly not think so. This rather in- 
describable element runs through a hundred English 
things, as in the love of bathos shown even in the sound 
of proper names; so that even the yearning lover in a 
lyric yearns for somebody named Sally rather than 
Salome, and for a place called Wapping rather than a 
place called Westermain. Even in the relapse into 
rowdiness there is a sort of relapse into comfort. There 
is also what is so large a part of comfort; carelessness. 
The undergraduate breaks windows because he does not 
care about windows, not because .he does care about more 
fresh air like a hygienist, or about more light like a Ger- 
man poet. Still less does he heroically smash a hundred 
windows because they come between him and the voice 
of Mrs. Asquith. But least of all does he do it because 
he seriously prides himself on the energy apart from its 
aim, and on the will-power that carries it through. He 
is not 'bound to smash the windows, even in the sense 



266 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

of being bent upon it. He is not bound at all but rather 
relaxed; and his violence is not only a relaxation but a 
laxity. Finally, this is shown in the fact that he only 
smashes windows when he is in the mood to smash 
windows; when some fortunate conjunction of stars 
and all the tints and nuances of nature whisper to 
him that it would be well to smash windows. But the 
American is always ready, at any moment, to waste his 
energies on the wilder and more suicidal course of going 
to lectures. And this is because to him such excitement 
is not a mood but a moral ideal. As I note in another 
connection, much of the English mystery would be clear 
to Americans if they understood the word *mood.' 
Englishmen are very moody, especially when they smash 
windows. But I doubt if many Americans understand 
exactly what we mean by the mood ; especially the passive 
mood. 

It is only by trying to get some notion of all this that 
an Englishman can enjoy the final crown and fruit of all 
international friendship ; which is really liking an Ameri- 
can to be American. If we only think that parts of him 
are excellent because parts of him are English, it would 
be far more sensible to stop at home and possibly enjoy 
the society of a whole complete Englishman. But any- 
body who does understand this can take the same pleasure 
in an American being American that he does In a 
thunderbolt being swift and a barometer being sensitive. 
He can see that a vivid sensibility and vigilance really 
radiate outwards through all the ramifications of 
machinery and even of materialism. He can see 
that the American uses his great practical powers 
upon very small provocation; but he can also 
see that there is a kind of sense of honour, like that of a 



THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 267 

duellist, in his readiness to be provoked. Indeed, there 
is some parallel between the American man of action, 
however vulgar his aims, and the old feudal, idea of the 
gentleman with a sword at his side. The gentleman may- 
have been proud of being strong or sturdy; he may too 
often have been proud of being thick-headed; but he was 
not proud of being thick-skinned. On the contrary, he 
was proud of being thin-skinned. He also seriously 
thought that sensitiveness was a part of masculinity. It 
may be very absurd to read of two Irish gentlemen try- 
ing to kill each other for trifles, or of two Irish-Ameri- 
can millionaires trying to ruin each other for trash. But 
the very pettiness of the pretext and even the purpose 
illustrates the same conception; which may be called the 
virtue of excitability. And it is really this, and not any 
rubbish about iron will-power and masterful mentality, 
that redeems with romance their clockwork cosmos and 
its industrial ideals. Being a live wire does not mean that 
the nerves should be like wires; but rather that the very 
wires should be like nerves. 

Another approximation to the truth would be to say that 
an American is really not ashamed of curiosity. It is not 
so simple as it looks. Men will carry off curiosity with 
various kinds of laughter and bravado, just as they will 
carry off drunkenness or bankruptcy. But very few peo- 
ple are really proud of lying on a door-step, and very few 
people are really proud of longing to look through a key- 
hole. I do not speak of looking through it, which 
involves questions of honour and self-control; but few 
people feel that even the desire is dignified. Now 
I fancy the American, at least by comparison with 
the Englishman, does feel that his curiosity is consistent 
with his dignity, because dignity is consistent with 



268 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

vivacity. He feels it is not merely the curiosity 
of Paul Pry, but the curiosity of Christopher Columbus. 
He is not a spy but an explorer; and he feels 
his greatness rather grow with his refusal to turn back, 
as a traveller might feel taller and taller as he neared the 
source of the Nile or the North- West passage. Many 
an Englishman has had that feeling about discoveries in 
dark continents; but he does not often have it about dis- 
coveries in daily life. The one type does believe in the 
indignity and the other in the dignity of the detective. 
It has nothing to do with ethics in the merely external 
sense. It involves no particular comparison in practical 
morals and manners. It is something in the whole poise 
and posture of the self ; of the way a man carries himself. 
For men are not only affected by what they are ; but still 
more, when they are fools, by what they think they are ; 
and when they are wise, by what they wish to be. 

There are truths that have almost become untrue by 
becoming untruthful. There are statements so often stale 
and insincere that one hesitates to use them, even when 
they stand for something more subtle. This point about 
curiosity is not the conventional complaint against the 
American interviewer. It is not the ordinary joke against 
the American child. And in the same way I feel the dan- 
ger of it being identified with the cant about 'a young 
nation' if I say that it has some of the attractions, not of. 
American childhood, but of real childhood. There is 
some truth in the tradition that the children of wealthy 
Americans tend to be too precocious and luxurious. But 
there is a sense in which we can really say that if the chil- 
dren are like adults, the adults are like children. And that 
sense is in the very best sense of childhood. It is some- 
thing which the modern world does not understand. 



THE SPIRIT OF AMERICA 269 

It is something that modem Americans do not under- 
stand, even when they possess it; but I think they do 
possess it. 

The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose ; and the 
text of Scripture which he now most commonly quotes 
is, *The kingdom of heaven is within you.' That text 
has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and prigs 
and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas 
in creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction 
with the peace that passes all understanding. And the 
text to be quoted in answer to it is that which declares 
that no man can receive the kingdom except as a little 
child. What we are to have inside is the childlike spirit ; 
but the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about 
what is inside. It is the first mark of possessing it that 
one is interested in what is outside. The most childlike 
thing about a child is his curiosity and his appetite and 
his power of wonder at the world. We might almost 
say that the whole advantage of having the kingdom 
within is that we look for it somewhere else. 



THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 

NINE times out of ten a man's broad-mindedness 
is necessarily the narrowest thing about him. 
This is not particularly paradoxical ; it is, when 
we come to think of it, quite inevitable. His vision of 
his own village may really be full of varieties ; and even 
his vision of his own nation may have a rough resem- 
blance to the reality. But his vision of the world is 
probably smaller than the world. His vision of the 
universe is certainly much smaller than the universe. 
Hence he is never so inadequate as when he is universal ; 
he is never so limited as when he generahses. This 
is the fallacy in many modern attempts at a creedless 
creed, at something variously described as essential 
Christianity or undenominational religion or a world 
faith to embrace all the faiths in the world. It is that 
every sectarian is more sectarian in his unsectarianism 
than he is in his sect. The emancipation of a Baptist 
is a very Baptist emancipation- The charity of a 
Buddhist is a very Buddhist charity, and very different 
from Christian charity. When a philosophy embraces 
everything it generally squeezes everything, and squeezes 
it out of shape; when it digests it necessarily assimilates. 
When a theosophist absorbs Christianity it is rather as a 
cannibal absorbs Christian missionaries. In this 
sense it is even possible for the larger thing to be 
swallowed by the smaller; and for men to move about 
not only in a Clapham sect but in a Clapham cosmos under 
Clapham moon and stars. 
But if this danger exists for all men, it exists espe- 

270 



THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 271 

cially for the Englishman. The Englishman is never so 
insular as when he is imperial ; except indeed when he is 
international. In private life he is a good friend and in 
practical politics often a very good ally. But theoretical 
politics are more practical than practical politics. And in 
theoretical politics the Englishman is the worst ally the 
world ever saw. This is all the more curious because he 
has passed so much of his historical life in the character 
of an ally. He has been in twenty great alliances and 
never understood one of them. He has neve^r been far- 
ther away from European politics than when he was fight- 
ing heroically in the thick of them. I myself think that 
this splendid isolation is sometimes really splendid; so 
long as it is isolation and does not imagine itself to be 
imperialism or internationalism. With the idea of being 
international, with the idea of being imperial, comes the 
frantic and farcical idea of being impartial. Generally 
speaking, men are never so mean and false and hypocriti- 
cal as when they are occupied in being impartial. They 
are performing the first and most typical of all the actions 
of the devil ; they are claiming the throne of God. Even 
when it is not hypocrisy but only mental confusion, it is 
always a confusion worse and worse confounded. We 
see it in the impartial historians of the Victorian Age, 
who now seem far more Victorian than the partial 
historians. Hallam wrote about the Middle Ages; but 
Hallam was far less mediaeval than Macaulay; for 
Macaulay was at least a fighter. Huxley had more 
mediaeval sympathies than Herbert Spencer for the 
same reason; that Huxley was a fighter. They both 
fought in many ways for the limitations of their 
own rationalistic epoch; but they were nearer the truth 
than the men who simply assumed those limitations 



272 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

as rational. The war of the controversionaHsts was 
a wider thing than the peace of the arbiters. And 
in the same way the EngHshman never cuts a less con- 
vincing figure before other nations than when he tries to 
arbitrate between them. 

I have by this time heard a great deal about the necessity 
of saving Anglo-American friendship, a necessity which 
I myself feel rather too strongly to be satisfied with the 
ambassadorial and editorial style of achieving it. I repeat 
that the worst road to Anglo-American friendship is to 
be Anglo-American; or, as the more illiterate would ex- 
press, to be Anglo-Saxon. I am more and more con- 
vinced that the way for the Englishman to do it is to be 
English; but to know that he is English and not every- 
thing else as well. Thus the only sincere answer to Irish 
nationalism is English nationalism, which is a reality; 
and not English imperialism, which is a reactionary fic- 
tion, or English internationalism, which is a revolutionary 
one. 

For the English are reviled for their imperialism be- 
cause they are not imperialistic. They dislike it, which 
is the real reason why they do it badly; and they do it 
badly, which is the real reason why they are disliked when 
they do it. Nobody calls France imperialistic because 
she has absorbed Brittany. But everybody calls England 
imperialistic because she has not absorbed Ireland. The 
Englishman is fixed and frozen for ever in the attitude of 
a ruthless conqueror ; not because he has conquered such 
people but because he has not conquered them; but he is 
always trying to conquer them with a heroism worthy 
of a better cause. For the really native and vigorous 
part of what is unfortunately called the British Empire 
is not an empire at all, and does not consist of these 



THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 273 

conquered provinces at all. It is not an empire but an 
adventure; w^hich is probably a much finer thing. It 
was not the power of making strange countries similar 
to our own, but simply the pleasure of seeing 
strange countries because they were different from our 
own. The adventurer did indeed, like the third son, set 
out to seek his fortune, but not primarily to alter other 
people's fortunes; he wished to trade with people rather 
than to rule them. But as the other people remained 
different from him, so did he remain different from them. 
The adventurer saw a thousand strange things and re- 
mained a stranger. He was the Robinson Crusoe 
on a hundred desert islands; and on each he remained 
as insular as on his: own island. 

What is wanted for the cause of England to-day is an 
Englishman with enough imagination to love his country 
from the outside as well as the inside. That is, we need 
somebody who will do for the English what has never 
been done for them, but what is done for any outlandish 
peasantry or even any savage tribe. We want people who 
can make England attractive; quite apart from disputes 
about whether England is strong or weak. We want 
somebody to explain, not that England is everywhere, 
but what England is anywhere ; not that England is or is 
not really dying, but why we do not want her to die. For 
this purpose the official and conventional compliments or 
claims can never get any farther than pompous abstrac- 
tions about Law and Justice and Truth ; the ideals which 
England accepts as every civilised state accepts them, 
and violates as every civilised state violates them. That 
is not the way in which the picture of any people has ever 
been painted on the sympathetic imagination of the world. 
Enthusiasts for old Japan did not tell us that the Japs 



274 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

recognised the existence of abstract morality; but that 
they lived in paper houses or wrote letters with paint- 
brushes. Men who wished to interest us in Arabs did not 
confine themselves to saying that they are monotheists or 
moralists ; they filled our romances with the rush of Arab 
steeds or the colours of strange tents or carpets. What 
we want is somebody who will do for the Englishman 
with his front garden what was done for the Jap and his 
paper house; who shall understand the Englishman with 
his dog as well as the Arab with his horse. In a word, 
what nobody has really tried to do is the one thing that 
really wants doing. It is to make England attractive as 
a nationality, and even as a small nationality. 

For it is a wild folly to suppose that nations will love 
each other because they are alike. They will never 
really do that unless they are really alike; and then they 
will not be nations. Nations can love each other as men 
and women love each other, not because they are alike but 
because they are different. It can easily be shown, I 
fancy, that in every case where a real public sympathy 
was aroused for some unfortunate foreign people, it has 
always been accompanied with a particular and positive 
interest in their most foreign customs and their most 
foreign externals. The man who made a romance of the 
Scotch Highlander made a romance of his kilt and even 
of his dirk; the friend of the Red Indians was interested 
in picture writing and had some tendency to be interested 
in scalping. To take a more serious example, such na- 
tions as Serbia had been largely commended to inter- 
national consideration by the study of Serbian epics or 
Serbian songs. The epoch of negro emancipation was 
also the epoch of negro melodies. Those who wept over 
Uncle Tom also laughed over Uncle Remus. And just 



THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 275 

as the admiration for the Redskin almost became an apol- 
ogy for scalping, the mysterious fascination of the Afri- 
can has sometimes almost led us into the fringes of the 
black forest of Voodoo. But the sort of interest that is 
felt even in the scalp-hunter and the cannibal, the torturer 
and the devil-worshipper, that sort of interest has never 
been felt in the Englishman. 

And this is! the more extraordinary because the English- 
man is really very interesting. He is interesting in a 
special degree in this special manner; he is interesting 
because he is individual. No man in the world is more 
misrepresented by everything official or even in the ordi- 
nary sense national. A description of English life must 
be a description of private life. In that sense there is no 
public life. In that sense there is no public opinion. 
There have never been those prairie fires of public opinion 
in England which often sweep over America. At any 
rate, there have never been any such popular revolutions 
since the popular revolutions of the Middle Ages. The 
English are a nation of amateurs; they are even a nation 
of eccentrics. An Englishman is never more English 
than when he is considered a lunatic by the other English- 
men. This can be clearly seen in a figure like Dr. John- 
son, who has become national not by being normal but 
by being extraordinary. To express this mysterious 
people, to explain or suggest why they like tall hedges 
and heavy breakfasts and crooked roads and small gar- 
dens with large fences, and why they alone among Chris- 
tians have kept quite consistently the great Christian 
glory of the open fireplace, here would be a strange and 
stimulating opportunity for any of the artists in words, 
who study the souls of strange peoples. That would 
be the true way to create a friendship between England 



276 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

and America, or between England and anything else ; yes, 
even between England and Ireland. For this justice at 
least has already been done to Ireland; and as an in- 
dignant patriot I demand a more equal treatment for the 
two nations. 

I have already noted the commonplace that in order 
to teach internationalism we must talk nationalism. We 
must make the nations as nations less odious or mysterious 
to each other. We do not make men love each other by 
describing a monster with a million arms and legs but by 
describing the men as men, with their separate and even 
solitary emotions. As this has a particular application 
to the emotions of the Englishman, I will expand the 
topic yet further. Now Americans have a power that is 
the soul and success of democracy, the power of spontane- 
ous social organisation. Their high spirits, their humane 
ideals, are really creative, they abound in unofficial institu- 
tions ; we might almost say in unofficial officialism*. No- 
body who has felt the presence of all the leagues and guilds 
and college clubs will deny that Whitman was national 
when he said he would build states and cities out of the 
love of comrades. When all this communal enthusiasm 
collides with the Englishman, it too often seems Hterally 
to leave him cold. They say he is reserved ; they possibly 
think he is rude. And the Englishman, having been 
taught his own history all wrong, is only too likely to take 
the criticism as a compliment. He admits that he is re- 
served because he is stern and strong; or even that he is 
rude because he is shrewd and candid. But as a fact he 
is not rude and not especially reserved; at least reserve 
is not the meaning of his reluctance. The real difference 
lies, I think, in the fact that American high spirits are not 
only high but level ; that the hilarious American spirit is 



THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 277 

nice a plateau, and the humorous English spirit like a 
ragged mountain range. 

The Englishman is moody ; which does not in the least 
mean that the Englishman is morose. Dickens, as we all 
feel in reading his books, was boisterously English. 
Dickens was moody when he wrote Oliver Tzvist; but he 
was also moody when he wrote Pickwick,. That is, he 
was in another and much healthier mood. The mood 
was normal to him in the sense that nine times out of ten 
he felt and wrote in that humorous and hilarious mood. 
But he was, if ever there was one, a man of moods; and 
all the more of a typical Englishman for being a man of 
moods. But it was because of this, almost entirely, that 
he had a misunderstanding with America. 

In America there are no moods, or there is only one 
mood. It is the same whether it is called hustle or uplift; 
whether we regard it as the heroic love of comrades or 
the last hysteria of the herd instinct. It has been said 
of the typical English aristocrats of the Government offi- 
ces that they resemble certain ornamental fountains and 
play from ten till four ; and it is true that an Englishman, 
even an English aristocrat, is not always inclined to play 
any more than to work. But American sociability is 
not like the Trafalgar fountains. It is like Niagara. It 
never stops, under the silent stars or the rolling storms. 
There seems always to be the same human heat and 
pressure behind it ; it is like the central heating of hotels 
as explained in the advertisements and announcements. 
The temperature can be regulated ; but it is not. And it 
is always rather overpowering for an Englishman, whose 
mood changes like his own mutable and shifting sky. 
The English mood is very like the English weather; it is 
a nuisance and a national necessity. 



278 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

If any one wishes to understand the quarrel between 
Dickens and the Americans, let him turn to that chapter 
in Martin Chuzzlewit, in which young Martin has to re- 
ceive endless defiles and deputations of total strangers 
each announced by name and demanding formal saluta- 
tion. There are several things to be noticed about this 
incident. To begin with, it did not happen to Martin 
Chuzzlewit ; but it did happen to Charles Dickens. Dick- 
ens is incorporating almost without alteration a passage 
from a diary in the middle of a story ; as he did when he 
included the admirable account of the prison petition of 
John Dickens as the prison petition of Wilkins Micawber. 
There is no particular reason why even the gregarious 
Americans should so throng the portals of a perfectly 
obscure steerage passenger like young Chuzzlewit. 
There was every reason why they should throng the 
portals of the author of Pickwick and Oliver Twist. 
And no doubt they did. If I may be permitted the alea- 
tory image, you bet they did. Similar troops of 
sociable human beings have visited much more insignif- 
icant English travellers in America, with some of whom 
I am myself acquainted. I myself have the luck to be a 
little more stodgy and less sensitive than many of my 
countrymen; and certainly less sensitive than Dickens. 
But I know what it was that annoyed him about that 
unending and unchanging stream of American visitors; 
it was the unending and unchanging stream of American 
sociability and high spirits. A people Hving on such a 
lofty but level tableland do not understand the ups and 
downs of the English temperament; the temper of a 
nation of eccentrics or (as they used to be called) of 
humorists. There is something very national in the very 
name of the old play of Every Man in His Humour, 



THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND '279 

But the play more often acted in real life is 'Every Man 
Out of His Humour.* It is true, as Matthew Arnold 
said, that an Englishman wants to do as he likes ; but it is 
not always true even that he likes what he likes. An 
Englishman can be friendly and yet not feel friendly. 
Or he can be friendly and yet not feel hospitable. Or' 
he can feel hospitable and yet not welcome those whonx 
he really loves. He can think, almost with tears of 
tenderness, about people at a distance who would be 
bares if they came in at the door. 

American sociability sweeps away any such subtlety. 
It cannot be expected to understand the paradox or 
perversity of the Englishman, who thus can feel friendly 
and avoid friends. That is the truth in the suggestion 
that Dickens was sentimental. It means that he prob- 
ably felt most sociable when he was solitary. In all 
these attempts to describe the indescribable, to indicate 
the real but unconscious differences between the two 
peoples, I have tried to balance my words without the 
irrelevant bias of praise and blame. Both characteristics 
always cut both ways. On one side this comradeship 
makes possible a certain communal courage, a demo- 
cratic derision of rich men in high places, that is not 
easy in our smaller and more stratified society. On 
the other hand the Englishman has certainly more liberty, 
if less equality and fraternity. But the richest compen- 
sation of the Englishman is not even in the word 'liberty,' 
but rather in the word 'poetry.' That humour of escape 
or seclusion, that genial isolation, that healing of wounded 
friendship by what Christian Science would call 
absent treatment, that is the best atmosphere of all for 
the creation of great poetry; and out of that came 'bare 
ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang' and 'thou 



28o WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

wast not made for death, immortal bird/ In this sense 
it is indeed true that poetry is emotion remembered in 
tranquillity; which may be extended to mean affection 
remembered in loneliness. There is in it a spirit not 
only of detachment but even of distance; a spirit which 
does desire, as in the old English rhyme, to be not only 
over the hills but also far away. In other words, in so 
far as it is true that the Englishman is an exception to the 
great truth of Aristotle, it is because he is not so near to 
Aristotle as he is to Homer. In so far as he is not by 
nature a political animal, it is because he is a poetical 
animal. We see it in his relations to the other animals ; 
his quaint and almost illogical love of dogs and horses 
and dependants whose political rights cannot possibly be 
defined in logic. Many forms of hunting or fishing are 
but an excuse for the same thing which the shameless 
literary man does without any excuse. Sport is speech- 
less poetry. It would be easy for a foreigner, by taking 
a few liberties with the facts, to make a satire about the 
sort of silent Shelley who decides ultimately to shoot the 
skylark. It would be easy to answer these poetic sug- 
gestions, by saying that he himself might be responsible 
for ruining the choirs where late sweet birds sang, 
or that the immortal bird was likely to be mortal when 
he was out with his gun. But these international satires 
are never just; and the real relations of an Englishman 
and an English bird are far more delicate. It would be 
equally easy and equally unjust to suggest a similar satire 
against American democracy; and represent Americans 
merely as birds of a feather who can do nothing but flock 
together. But this again leaves out the fact that at least 
it is not the white feather; that democracy is capable of 
defiance and of death for an idea. Touching the souls 



THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 281 

of great nations, these criticisms are generally false be- 
cause they are critical. 

But when we are qu'ite sure that we rejoice in a na- 
tion's strength, then and not before we are justified in 
judging its weakness. I am quite sure that I rejoice 
in any democratic success without arriere pensce ; and no- 
body who knows me will credit me with a covert sneer 
at civic equality. And this being granted, I do think 
there is a danger in the gregariousness of American so- 
ciety. The danger of democracy is not anarchy; as 
I have said, it is convention. And it is touching this that 
all my experience has increased my conviction that a great 
deal that is called female emancipation has merely been 
the increase of female convention. Now the males of 
every community are far too conventional; it was the 
females who were individual and criticised the conven- 
tions of the tribe. If the females become conventional 
also, there is a danger of individuality being lost. This 
indeed is not peculiar to America; it is common to the 
whole modern industrial world, and to everything which 
substitutes the impersonal atmosphere of the state for 
the personal atmosphere of the home. But it is empha- 
sised in America by the curious contradiction that Ameri- 
cans do in theory value and even venerate the individual. 
But individualism is the reverse of individuality. Where 
men are trying to compete with each other they are try- 
ing to copy each other. They become standardised by 
the very standard of self. Personality, in becoming a 
conscious ideal, becomes a common ideal. In this respect 
perhaps there is really something to be learnt from the 
Englishman with his turn or twist in the direction of 
private life. Those who have travelled in such a fash- 
ion as to see all the American hotels and none of the 



282 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

American houses are sometimes driven to the excess of 
saying that the Americans have no private Hfe. But 
even if the exaggeration has a hint of truth, v^e must bal- 
ance it with the corresponding truth; that the EngHsh 
have no pubHc Hfe. They on their side have still to 
learn the meaning of the public thing, the republic; and 
hov^ great are the dangers of cowardice and corruption 
when the very state itself has become a state secret. 

The English are patriotic; but patriotism is the un- 
conscious form of nationalism. It is being national with- 
out understanding the meaning of a nation. The Ameri- 
cans are on the whole too self-conscious, kept moving too 
much in the pace of public life, with all its temptations 
to superficiality and fashion; too much aware of outside 
opinion and with too much appetite for outside criticism. 
But the English are much too unconscious; and would 
be the better for an increase in many forms of conscious- 
ness, including consciousness of sin. But even their 
sin is ignorance of their real virtue. The most admirable 
English things are not the things that are most admired 
by the English, or for which the English admire them- 
selves. They are things now blindly neglected and in 
daily danger of being destroyed. It is all the worse that 
they should be destroyed, because there is really nothing 
like them in the world. That is why I have suggested a 
note of nationalism rather than patriotism for the Eng- 
lish; the power of seeing their nation as a nation and not 
as the nature of things. We say of some ballad from 
the Balkans or some peasant costume in the Netherlands 
that it is unique; but the good things of England really 
are unique. Our very isolation from continental wars 
and revolutionary reconstructions have kept them unique. 
The particular kind of beauty there is in an English 



THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND 283 

village, the particular kind of humour there is in an Eng- 
lish public-house, are things that cannot be found in 
lands where the village is far more simply and equally 
governed, or where the vine is far more honourably 
served and praised. Yet we shall not save them by 
merely sinking into them with the conservative sort of 
contentment, even if the commercial capacity of our 
plutocratic reforms would allow us to do so. We must 
in a sense get far away from England in order to behold 
her; we must rise above patriotism in order to be practi- 
cally patriotic ; we must have some sense of more varied 
and remote things before these vanishing virtues can be 
seen suddenly for what they are; almost as one might 
fancy that a man would have to rise to the dizziest heights 
of the divine understanding before he saw, as from a 
peak far above a whirlpool, how precious is his perishing 
soul. 



THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 

THE title of this final chapter requires an apology. 
I do not need be reminded, alas, that the whole 
book requires an apology. It is written in ac- 
cordance with a ritual or custom in which I could see no 
particular harm, and which gives me a very interesting 
subject, but a custom which it would be not altogether 
easy to justify in logic. Everybody who goes to America 
for a short time is expected to write a book ; and nearly 
everybody does. A man who takes a holiday at Trou- 
ville or Dieppe is not confronted on his return with the 
question, 'When is your book on France going to appear ?* 
A man who betakes himself to Switzerland for the 
winter sports is not instantly pinned by the statement, 
*I suppose your History of the Helvetian Republic is 
coming out this spring?' Lecturing, at least my kind of 
lecturing, is not much more serious or meritorious than 
ski-ing or sea-bathing; and it happens to" afford the holi- 
day-maker far less opportunity of seeing the daily life 
of the people. Of all this I am only too well aware; and 
my only defence is that I am at least sincere in my enjoy- 
ment and appreciation of America, and equally sincere 
in my interest in its most serious problem, which I think 
a very serious problem indeed; the problem of democracy 
in the modern world. Democracy may be a very obvious 
and facile affair for plutocrats and politicians who only 
have to use it as a rhetorical term. But democracy is a 
very serious problem for democrats. I certainly do not 
apologise for the word democracy ; but I do apologise for 

284 



THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 285 

the word future. I am no Futurist ; and any conjectures 
I make must be taken with a grain of salt which is indeed 
the salt of the earth; the descent and moderate humility 
which comes from a belief in free will. That faith is in 
itself a divine doubt. I do not believe in any of the 
scientific predictions about mankind; I notice that they 
always fail to predict any of the purely human develop- 
ments of men; I also notice that even their successes 
prove the same truth as their failures; for their success- 
ful predictions are not about men but about machines. 
But there are two things which a man may reasonably 
do, in stating the probabilities of a problem, which do 
not involve any claim to be a prophet. The first is to 
tell the truth, and especially the neglected truth, about 
the tendencies that have already accumulated in human 
history; any miscalculation about which must at least 
mislead us in any case. We cannot be certain of being 
right about the future; but we can be almost certain of 
being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the 
past. The other thing that he can da is to note what 
ideas necessarily go together by their own nature; what 
ideas will triumph together or fall together. Hence it 
fallows that this chapter must consist of two things. 
The first is a summary of what has really happened to 
the idea of democracy in recent times ; the second a sug- 
gestion of the fundamental doctrine which is necessary 
for its triumph at any time. 

The last hundred years have seen a general decline 
in the democratic idea. H there be anybody left to 
whom this historical truth appears a paradox, it is only 
because during that period nobody has been taught his- 
tory, least of all the history of ideas, li a sort of in- 
tellectual inquisition had been established, for the defini- 



286 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

tion and differentiation of heresies, it would have been 
found that the original republican orthodoxy had suffered 
more and more from secessions, schisms and backsHd- 
ings. The highest point of democratic idealism and 
conviction was towards the end of the eighteenth cent- 
ury, when the American .Republic was 'dedicated to the 
proposition that all men are equal' It was then that 
the largest number of men had the most serious sort of 
conviction that the political problem could be solved by 
the vote of peoples instead of the arbitrary power of 
princes and privileged orders. These men encountered 
various difficulties and made various compromises in 
relation to the practical politics of their time; in England 
they preserved aristocracy; in America they preserved 
slavery. But though they had more difficulties, they had 
less doubt. Since their time democracy has been steadily 
disintegrated by doubts; and these political doubts have 
been contemporary with and often identical with re- 
ligious doubts. This fact could be followed over almost 
the whole field of the modern world ; in this place it will 
be more appropriate to take the great American ex- 
ample of slavery. I have found traces in all sorts of 
intelligent quarters of an extraordinary idea that all 
the Fathers of the Republic owned black men like beasts 
of burden because they knew no better, until the light 
of liberty was revealed to them by John Brown and Mrs. 
Beecher Stowe. One of the best weekly papers in Eng- 
land said recently that even those who drew up the Dec- 
laration of Independence did not include negroes in its 
generalisation about humanity. This is quite consistent 
with the current convention, in which we were all brought 
up; the theory that the heart of humanity broadens 
in ever larger circles of brotherhood, till we pass from 



THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 287 

embracing a black man to adoring a black beetle. Un- 
fortunately it is quite inconsistent with the facts of 
American history. The facts show that, in this problem 
of the Old South, the eighteenth century was more lib- 
eral than the nineteenth century. There was more sym- 
pathy for the negro in the school of Jefferson than in 
the school of Jefferson Davis. Jefferson, in the dark 
estate of his simple Deism, said the sight of slavery in 
hts country made him tremble, remembering that God 
is just. His fellow Southerners, after a century of the 
world's advance, said that slavery in itself was good^ 
when they did not go farther and say that negroes in 
themselves were bad. And they were supported in this 
by the great and growing modern suspicion that nature 
is unjust. Difficulties seemed inevitably to delay justice, 
to the mind of Jefferson ; but so they did to the mind of 
Lincoln. But that the slave was human and the servitude 
inhuman — that was, if anything, clearer to Jefferson than 
to Lincoln. The fact is that the utter separation and sub- 
ordination of the black like a beast was a progress; it was 
a growth of nineteenth-century enlightenment and ex- 
periment; a triumph of science over superstition. It 
was 'the way the world was going,' as Mathew Arnold 
reverentially remarked in some connection; perhaps as 
part of a definition of God. Anyhow, it was not Jeffer- 
son's definition of God. He fancied, in his far-off pa- 
trlarchlal way, a Father who had made all men brothers ; 
and brutally unbrotherly as was the practice, such demo- 
cratical Deists never dreamed of denying the theory. 
It w^as not until the scientific sophistries began that 
brotherhood was really disputed. Gobineau, who began 
most of the modern talk about the superiority and in- 
feriority of racial stocks, was seized upon eagerly by the 



288 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

less generous of the slave-owners and trumpeted as a 
new truth of science and a new defence of slavery. It 
was not really until the dawn of Darwinism, when all 
our social relations began to smell of the' monkey-house, 
that men thought of the barbarian as only a first and the 
baboon as a second cousin. The full servile philosophy 
has been a modern and even a recent thing; made in an 
age whose inevitable deity was the Missing Link. The 
Missing Link was a true metaphor in more ways than 
one ; and most of all in its suggestion of a chain. 

By a symbolic coincidence, indeed, slavery grew more 
brazen and brutal under the encouragement of more than 
one movement of the progressive sort. Its youth was re- 
newed for it by the industrial prosperity of Lancashire; 
and under that influence it became a commercial and 
competitive instead of a patriarchal and customary thing. 
We may say with no exaggerative irony that the uncon- 
scious patrons of slavery were Huxley and Cobden. The 
machines of Manchester were manufacturing a great 
many more things than the manufacturers knew or 
wanted to know; but they were certainly manufacturing 
the fetters of the slave, doubtless out of the best quality 
of steel and iron. But this is a minor illustration of 
the modern tendency, as compared with the main stream 
of scepticism which was destroying democracy. Evo- 
lution became more and more a vision of the break-up 
of our brotherhood, till by the end of the nineteenth 
century the genius of its greatest scientific romancer 
saw it end in the anthropophagous antics of the Time 
Machine. So far from evolution lifting us above the 
idea of enslaving men, it was providing us at least with 
a logical and potential argument for eating them. In the 
case of the American negroes, it may be remarked, it 



^ THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 289 

does at any rate permit the preliminary course of roast- 
ing them. All this materialistic hardening, which re- 
placed the remorse of Jefferson, was part of the growing 
evolutionary suspicion that savages were not a part of 
the human race, or rather that there was really no such 
thing as the human race. The South had begun by 
agreeing reluctantly to the enslavement of men. The 
South ended by agreeing equally reluctantly to the 
emancipation of monkeys. 

That is what had happened to the democratic ideal 
in a hundred years. Anybody can test it by comparing 
the final phase, I will not say with the ideal of Jefferson, 
but with the i^deal of Johnson. There was far more 
horror of slavery in an eighteenth-century Tory like 
E^r. Johnson than in a nineteenth-century democrat like 
Stephen Douglas. Stephen Douglas may be mentioned 
because he is a very representative type of the age of 
evolution and expansion; a man thinking in continents, 
like Cecil Rhodes, human and hopeful in a truly 
American fashion, and as a consequence cold and 
careless rather than hostile in the matter of the old 
mystical doctrines of equality. He *did not care 
whether slavery was voted up or voted down.* His 
great opponent Lincoln did indeed care very much. 
But it was an intense individual conviction with Lin- 
coln exactly as it was with Johnson. I doubt if the 
spirit of the age was not much more behind Douglas 
and his westward expansion of the white race. I am 
sure that more and more men were coming to be in the 
particular mental condition of Douglas; men in whom 
the old moral and mystical ideals had been undermined 
by doubt, but only with a negative effect of indifference. 
Their positive convictions were all concerned with what 



290 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

some called progress and some imperialism. It is true 
that there was a sincere sectional enthusiasm against 
slavery in the North; and that the slaves were actually 
emancipated in the nineteenth century. But I doubt 
whether the Aboliti'onists would ever have secured Aboli- 
tion. Abolition was a by-product of the Civil War; 
which was fought for quite other reasons. Anyhow, if 
slavery had somehow survived to the age of Rhodes and 
Roosevelt and evolutionary imperialism, I doubt if the 
slaves would ever have been emancipated at all. Cer- 
tainly if it had survived till the modern movement for 
the Servile State, they would never have been emanci- 
pated at all. Why should the world take the chains off 
the black man when it was just putting them on the white? 
And in so far as we owe the change to Lincoln, we owe 
it to Jefferson. Exactly what gives its real dignity to 
the figure of Lincoln is that he stands invoking a primi- 
tive first principle of the age of innocence, and holding up 
the tables of an ancient law, against the trend of the 
nineteenth century; repeating, 'We hold these truths to 
be self-evident; that all men were created equal, being en- 
dowed by their Creator, etc.,' to a generation that was 
more and more disposed to say something like this : 'We 
hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists ; 
that all things looking like men were evolved somehow, 
being endowed by heredity and environment with no 
equal rights, but very unequal wrongs,' and so on. I do 
not believe that creed, left to itself, would ever have 
founded a state ; and I am pretty certain that, left to itself, 
it would never have overthrown a slave state. What 
it did do, as I have said, was to produce some very won- 
derful literary and artistic flights of sceptical imagination. 
The world did have new visions, if they were visions of 



THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 291 

monsters in the moon and Martians striding about like 
spiders as tall as the sky, and the workmen and capitalists 
becoming two separate species, so that one could devour 
the other as gaily and greedily as a cat devours a bird. 
No one has done justice to the meaning of Mr. Wells 
and his original departure in fantastic fiction; to these 
nightmares that were the last apocalypse of the nineteenth 
century. They meant that the bottom had fallen out 
of the mind at last, that the bridge of brotherhood had 
broken down in the modern brain, letting up from the 
chasms this infernal light like a dawn. All had grown 
dizzy with degree and relativity; so that there would not 
be so very much difference between eating dog and eating 
darkie, or between eating darkie and eating dago. There 
were different sorts of apes ; but there was no doubt that 
we were the superior sort. 

Against all this irresistible force stood one immovable 
post. Against all this dance of doubt and degree stood 
something that can best be symbolished by a simple exam- 
ple. An ape cannot be a priest, but a negro can be a 
priest. The dogmatic type of Christianity, especially 
the Catholic type of Christianity, had riveted itself irre- 
vocably to the manhood of all men. Where its faith was 
fixed by creeds and councils it could not save itself even 
by surrender. It could not gradually dilute democracy, 
as could a merely sceptical or secular democrat. There 
stood, in fact or in* possibility, the solid and smiling ffgure 
of a black bishop. And he was either a man- claiming the 
most towering spiritual privileges of a man, or he was 
the mere buffoonery and blasphemy of a monkey in a 
mitre. That is the point about Christian and Catholic 
democracy; it is not that it is necessarily at any moment 
more democratic, it is that its indestructible minimum 



292 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

of democracy really is indestructible. And by the nature 
of things that mystical democracy was destined to survive, 
when every other sort of democracy was free to destroy 
itself. And whenever democacy destroying itself is sud- 
denly moved to save itself, it always grasps at a rag or 
tag of that old tradition that alone is sure of itself. Hun- 
dreds have heard the story about the mediaeval dema- 
gogue who went about repeating the rhyme 

When Adam delved and Eve span, 
Who was then the gentleman? 

Many have doubtless offered the obvious answer to the 
question, The Serpent.' But few seem to have 
noticed what would be the more modern answer 
to the question, if that innocent agitator went about pro- 
pounding it. *Adam never delved and Eve never span, 
for the simple reason that they never existed. They are 
fragments of a Chaldeo-Babylonian mythos, and Adam 
is only a slight variation of Tag-Tug, pronounced Uttu. 
For the real beginning of humanity we refer you to Dar- 
win's Origin of Species/ And then the modern man 
would go on to justify plutocracy to the mediaeval man 
by talking about the Struggle for Life and the Survival 
of the Fittest ; and how the strongest man seized authority 
by means of anarchy, and proved himself a gentleman 
by behaving like a cad. Now I do not base my beliefs 
on the theology of John Ball, or on the literal and mate- 
riaHstic reading of the text of Genesis; though I think 
the story of Adam and Eve infinitely less absurd and un- 
likely than that of the prehistoric 'strongest man' who 
could fight a hundred men. But I do note the fact that 
the idealism of the leveller could be put in the form of 
an appeal to Scripture, and could not be put in the form 



THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 293 

of an appeal to Science. And I do note also that demo- 
crats were still driven to make the same appeal even in the 
very century of Science. Tennyson was, if ever there 
was one, an evolutionist in his vision and an aristocrat 
in his sympathies. He was always boasting that John 
Bull was evolutionary and not revolutionary, even as 
these Frenchmen. He did not pretend to have any creed 
beyond faintly trusting the larger hope. But when hu- 
man dignity is really in danger, John Bull has to use the 
same old argument as John Ball. He tells Lady Clara 
Vere de Vere that 'the gardener Adam and his wife smile 
at the claim of long descent'; their own descent being by 
no means long. Lady Clara might surely have scored off 
him pretty smartly by quoting from 'Maud' and 'In Mem- 
oriam' about evolution and the eft that was lord of valley 
and hill. But Tennyson has evidently forgotten all about 
Darwin^and the long descent of man. If this was true of 
an evolutionist like Tennyson, it was naturally ten times 
truer of a revolutionist like Jefferson. The Declaration 
of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact 
that God created. all men equal; and it is right; for if they 
were not created equal, they were certainly evolved un- 
equal. 

There is no basis for democracy except In a dogma 
about the divine origin of man. That is a perfectly sim- 
ple fact which the modern world will find out more and 
more to be a fact. Every other basis Is a sort of senti- 
mental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older 
creeds. Those verbal associations are always, vain for 
the vital purpose of constraining the tyrant. An idealist 
may say to a capitalist, 'Don't you sometimes feel in the 
rich twilight, when the lights twinkle from the distant 
hamlet in the hills, that all humanity is a holy family?' 



294 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

But it is equally possible for the capitalist to reply with 
brevity and decision, *No, I don't/ and there is no more 
disputing about it further than about the beauty of a fad- 
ing cloud. And the modern world of moods is a world 
of clouds, even if some of them are thunderclouds. 

For I have only taken here, as a convenient working 
model, the case of negro slavery; because it was long 
peculiar to America and is popularly associated with it. 
It is more and more obvious that the line is no longer 
running between black and white but between rich' and 
poor. As I have already noted in the case of Prohibi- 
tion, the very same arguments, of the inevitable suicide 
of the ignorant, of the impossibility of freedom for the 
unfit, which were once applied to barbarians brought 
from Africa are now applied to citizens born in America. 
It is argued even by industrialists that industrialism has 
produced a class submerged below the status of emanci- 
pated mankind. They imply that the Missing Link is 
no longer missing, even from England or the Northern 
States, and that the factories have manufactured their 
own monkeys. Scientific hypotheses about the feeble- 
minded and the criminal type will supply the masters of 
the modern world with more and more excuses for de- 
nying the dogma of equality in the case of white labour 
as well as black. And any man who knows the world 
knows perfectly well that to tell the millionaires, or their 
servants, that they are disappointing the sentiments of 
Thomas Jefferson, or disregarding a creed composed in 
the eighteenth century, will be about as effective as 
telling them that they are not observing the creed of 
St. Athanasius or keeping the rule of St. Benedict. 

The world cannot keep its own ideals. The secular 



THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 295 

order cannot make secure any one of its own noble and 
natural conceptions of secular perfection. That will be 
found, as time goes on, the ultimate argument for a 
Church independent of the world and the secular order; 
What has become of all those ideal figures from the Wise 
Man of the Stoics to the democratic Deist of the eight- 
eenth century? What has become of all that purely hu- 
man hierarchy or chivalry, with its punctilious pattern 
of the good knight, its ardent ambition in the young 
squire ? The very name of knight has come to represent 
the petty triumph of a profiteer, and the very word squire 
the petty tyranny of a landlord. What has become of 
all that golden liberality of the Humanists, who found on 
the high tablelands of the culture of Hellas the very bal- 
ance of repose in beauty that is most lacking in the mod- 
em world? The very Greek language that they loved 
has become a mere label for snuffy and snobbish dons, 
and a mere cock-shy for cheap and half -educated utilita- 
rians, who make it a symbol of superstition and reaction. 
We have lived to see a time when the heroic legend of 
the Republic and the Citizen, which seemed to Jefferson 
the eternal youth of the world, has begun to grow old in 
its turn. We cannot recover the earthly estate of knight- 
hood, to which all the colours and complications of her- 
aldry seemed as fresh and natural as flowers. We can- 
not re-enact the intellectual experiences of the Humanists, 
for whom the Greek grammar was like the song of a bird 
in spring. The more the matter is considered the clearer 
it will seem that these old experiences are now only alive, 
where they have found a lodgment in the Catholic tradi- 
tion of Christendom, and made themselves friends for 
ever. St. Francis is the only surviving troubadour. St.' 



296 WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA 

Thomas More is the only surviving Humanist. St. Louis 
is the only surviving knight. 

It would be the worse sort of insincerity, therefore, 
to conclude even so hazy an outline of so great and majes- 
tic a matter as the American democratic experiment, with- 
out testifying my belief that to this also the same ultimate 
test will come. So far as that democracy becomes or 
remains Catholic and Christian, that democracy will re- 
main democratic. In so far it does not, it will become 
wildly and wickedly undemocratic. Its rich will riot with 
a brutal indifference far beyound the feeble feudalism 
which retains some shadow of responsibility or at least 
of patronage. Its wage-slaves will either sink into hea- 
then slavery, or seek relief in theories that are destructive 
not merely in method but in aim; since they are but the 
negations of the human appetites ai property and per- 
sonality. Eighteenth-century ideals, formulated in eight- 
eenth-century language, have no longer in themselves the 
power to hold all those pagan passions back. Even those 
documents depended upon Deism ; their real strength will 
survive in men who are still Deists. And the men who 
are still Deists are more than Deists. Men will more and 
more realise that there is no meaning in democracy if 
there is no meaning in anything; and that there is no 
meaning in anything if the universe has not a centre of 
significance and an authority that is the author of our 
rights. There is truth in every ancient fable, and 
there is here even something of it in the fancy that 
finds the symbol of the Republic in the bird that bore 
the bolts of Jove. Owls and bats may wander where 
they will in darkness, and for them as for the sceptics 
the universe may have no centre ; kites and vultures may 



THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 297 

linger as they like over carrion, and for them as for the 
plutocrats existence may have no origin and no end ; but it 
was far back in the land of legends, where instincts find 
their true images, that the cry went forth tha.t freedom is 
an eagle, whose glory is gazing at the sun. 



THE END 



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